THE SYNTAX OF JAPANESE RECIPROCAL V-V COMPOUNDS: A VIEW FROM SPLIT ANTECEDENTS

Abstract

Japanese has two ways to indicate reciprocity between plural subjects: one makes use of a reciprocal anaphor otagai and the other makes use of a special type of V-V compound in which a reciprocal verb au ‘meet’ resides in the second position, which we call the au-construction. Furthermore, otagai and au can co-occur in a single sentence. I will show that otagai has a peculiar binding nature: it basically does not allow split antecedents but exceptionally allows split antecedents in the au-construction. Based ondetailed observations regarding this fact, I will propose a new syntactic analysis of the au-construction. I will also show some semantic differences between otagai and the au-construction and propose that au unifies plural events into a single coextensive event.