Adverbial particle modification and argument ellipsis in Japanese

This paper shows that adverbial particles are divided into the “strong” and “weak” types depending on how they behave in the context of argument ellipsis. In the argument ellipsis construction, the strong type of adverbial particle ( dake ‘only’) does not allow a null argument to include its adverbial meaning, while the weak type of adverbial particle ( sae ‘even’) allows a null argument to include the adverbial meaning optionally. We argue that the adverbial particle dake ‘only’ (which belongs to the strong type) projects to its maximal projection taking its host DP as a complement after QR, while the particle sae ‘even’ (belonging to the weak type) is adjoined to its host DP by QR without projecting any further. The divergence in the behavior of adverbial particles can be accounted for only if null arguments are interpreted with reference to the LF structures of their antecedent arguments. The data regarding the two types of adverbial particles provide substantial evidence that allows us to choose the LF copying analysis over the other alternative syntactic analyses.