Same Verb Coordination and its Derivation

This book first investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of Japanese verbal reduplication, tabe-ni-tabe-ta (eat-NI-eat-PAST). From the comparative study with English, I claim that –ni between verbs is a conjunction, and the verbal reduplication is in fact same verb coordination as its English counterpart, ate and ate. English and Japanese same verb coordination share several properties, meaning for example. However, they do not share a few properties such as a constituency between a verb and a conjunction. I argue that Parameterized version of Merge (PM) (Saito and Fukui 1998, and Fukui 2003) correctly predict the differences of same verb coordination between the two languages, while captures the similarities. The derivation of same verb coordination in this book lends support to PM’s claims that Merge generates an ordered pair, as opposed to an unordered pair as in Chomsky (1995).