| The question that centers the discussions of this thesis is why in Japanese it is possible to relativize a subject out of a subject and more problematic to relativize an object out of an object. In English and many other languages, both relative clauses are not readily allowed. The latter phenomenon is predicted by the Subjacency Condition.;One component of the answer to the question lies in the structure of Japanese, which has been characterized as an SOV language. It is argued that the clause-internal structure of Japanese is considerably different from that of English and other SVO languages. Central claims of the Antisymmetry Theory (Kayne 1994) are applied to derive the clause-internal structure and the structure of pre-nominal relatives of Japanese. The analysis also incorporates multiple complementizer projections (Rizzi 1997) to accommodate order flexibility of this language. For the derivation of pre-nominal relatives, it is argued that there is no operator movement; instead, movement of the ‘head’ nominal phrase is pursued, the possibility of which is re-introduced in Kayne (1994). The discussion also includes a proposal of a KP system to account for the absence of KP/PP relativization in Japanese.;Another ingredient of the answer concerns the formulations of locality conditions. Two of them are discussed extensively from a Minimalist point of view (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001): a condition on agreement and a condition on movement. For the former, a version of the Intervention Condition is adopted. For the latter, it is considered that neither old Subjacency nor the Phase Impenetrability Condition is optimal, and a new condition is proposed, the Opacity Condition. It is demonstrated here that the raising of the ‘head’ in relativization of a subject out of a subject relative in Japanese is ruled out by neither the Intervention Condition nor the Opacity Condition, while that in relativization of an object out of an object violates the Opacity Condition.;Finally, this thesis discusses issues on overt resumptive pronouns, counterexamples, and wh-question. |
