Raising-to-Object in Japanese and the Role of Topic/Nominative Case Markers in the Cognitive Processing

摘要

This paper reports a result of a psycholinguistic experiment concerning Raising-to-Object (RTO) and the role of the Topic/Nominative distinction in the subject NPs in Japanese. I argue that the parser is not always sensitive to string-vacuous-type raising like RTO, while the parser shows a strong sensitivity toward overt movements. Our result showed that the word order that involves the overt scrambling was significantly more difficult than the types involving RTO. This raises a further issue for the role of case markings on the subjects, whose distinction could also serve as a potential difficulty in the processing of the relevant construction.