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This article reexamines the syntax of Japanese Right Dislocation Constructions (RDCs) relative to their prosodic structures and explores their clausal nature. In the literature on Japanese RDCs, two major issues have been addressed: a mono-versus a bi-clausal structure and movement versus base-generation in terms of postverbal elements along with the identification of preverbal null elements. However, the prosodic structures of the constructions remain unexplored. The present article shows that the same surface string of an RDC may possibly have different prosodic structures and bear corresponding interpretations. This remarkable fact poses a challenge to a uniform analysis of the constructions. The article argues that Japanese RDCs are divided into mono- and bi-clausal types. While defending a mono-clausal analysis with movement for some RDCs, the present article proposes additional bi-clausal analyses besides the most prevailing analysis of other RDCs. The evidence suggests that Japanese RDCs make use of different linguistic strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of person agreement in the imposter phenomenon studied by Collins & Postal (2012). In the constructions, full DPs are used to refer to speech-act participants like personal pronouns. Nonetheless, person agreement caused by imposters morphsyntactically varies in a subject-verb relation and subject-object relation cross-linguistically. Moreover, members of the classes of imposters are also not identical among languages. These patterns differ from those of personal pronouns. The paper argues that dual properties of the person feature (semantic and morphological) do not always coincide, leading to agreement alternations in PF. Furthermore, the D head does not always involve the person feature value, which induces dialectal and cross-linguistic variation. The analysis shows that regardless of the cross-linguistic variations, the syntactic operation for agreement is uniform in imposter constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a particular type of English control constructions that exhibits morphosyntactic variation. The constructions that are investigated are control that appears in the imposter phenomenon studied by Collins & Postal (2012). Using minimalist syntax in combination with the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), a syntactic account is offered that validates such variation and shows evidence for PRO in infinitives with imposter constructions, rather than a trace of NP via movement. Furthermore, comparing PRO and pro for the subject gap of control, it shows that PRO can account for binding alternations unlike pro. The current analysis demonstrates that the lack of the underspecification of phi-feature valuation does not result in ungrammaticality whereas the failure of Agree itself leads to ungrammaticality. Moreover, the current analysis offers a systematic picture of the morphosyntactic variation of English nominals in terms of the person feature and it also accounts for cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation in agreement displayed in Chinese and Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]