| This paper investigates the derivation of Japanese verbal reduplication, tabe-ni-tabe-ta (eat-NI-eat-PAST), based on its syntactic and semantic properties. From the comparative study with English, I claim that –ni between verbs is a conjunction, and the verbal reduplication is in fact 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, which reflects the head-parametric difference of the two languages. I argue that Parameterized version of Merge (PM) (Saito and Fukui 1998, and Fukui 2003) correctly predict differences of same verb coordination between the two languages, while captures their similarities. The derivation of same verb coordination in this paper lends support to PM's claims that Merge generates an ordered pair, as opposed to an unordered pair as in Chomsky (1995). |
