The Kaynean Analysis of Nominal Modification and Its Parametric Implications

This presentation addresses an important issue of cross-linguistic parametrization of the inventory of functional categories, focusing on the empirical domain of nominal modification in Japanese and English. By closely examining the intersectivity of interpretation and the temporal nature of nominal modification in English and Japanese, it is demonstrated that pushing the Kaynean analysis of nomainal modification (Kayne 1994, Bianchi 1999, 2000) will lead us to conclude that Japanese does not involve the underlying D-CP configuration and, as a result, it lacks the functional category D in the lexicon, providing further support to Fukui (1986, 1988, 1995). To the extent that our arguments are on the right track, the present study seems to make for the idea that Japanese-type languages lack the functional category D in the lexicon, which yields various ramifications in the empirical domain of nominal modification as well as "agreement"-related phenomena. It is hoped that the present study will shed some new light on the typology of adjectival modification cross-linguistically.