The Phonological Analysis of Left Branch Extraction in Japanese

Boskovic (2005) lays out five prerequisites for Left Branch Extraction (LBE): (i) scrambling; (ii) the absence of DP; (iii) NP-over-AP structure; (iv) the left-edge condition; and (v) agreement (see also Boskovic 2008, 2012, 2013). Japanese seems to satisfy the prerequisites (i)-(iv), but not (v) agreement. If agreement is a strict requirement for LBE, languages that lack φ-agreement, such as Japanese, are expected to disallow LBE. However, if agreement is merely a preferred or default option for LBE, it is plausible that languages without agreement may employ an alternative strategy to make LBE possible. We argue that Japanese, which lacks φ-agreement, actually employs an alternative strategy based on prosody to facilitate LBE. Specifically, we argue that the low acceptability of LBE in Japanese results from a phonological restriction on the relevant movement, showing that the phonological restriction can be alleviated or overridden by prosodic factors related to focus and topic.