Apparent non-constituent coordination in Japanese

Abstract

Coordination in Japanese poses various puzzles which defy the standard notion of syntactic category. On the one hand, one can conjoin structures which one usually would not expect to form any constituent, and on the other hand, there are various conjunction particles that are sensitive to the kind of conjuncts that they combine with. In this paper we argue against abandoning the usual notion of constituency, and redefining the entire grammar of Japanese. We provide a novel construction-based account of the data in which the phenomena result from the interaction of the coordination construction, ellipsis, and allomorphy of the conjunction particle.