An Argument for Japanese Right Dislocation as a Feature-driven Movement

Abstract

This paper argues that Japanese Right Dislocation involves a feature-driven movement. By using the so-called sika-nai construction, it will be shown that Japanese Right Dislocation does not allow reconstruction. Since typical feature-driven movement such as English wh-movement and topicalization does not allow reconstruction while scrambling does allow reconstruction, it will be concluded that Japanese Right Dislocation is a feature-driven movement. This conclusion supports the parameter value preservation (PVP) measure proposed in Fukui 1993 which predicts that a rightward movement in a head-final language is costly and must be feature-driven