WH-Sentences in Japanese and the Speech Act Structure

Abstract

Miyagawa (2012) argues for the existence of the Speech Act structure, which is dedicated to dealing with discourse related information such as SPEAKER and HEARER. He does it by examining cases involving allocative agreement, namely, HEARER oriented agreement. This paper discusses cases provided by Yokoyama (2013) as counterexamples to Miyagawa’s analysis and offers an account for them, which is based on SPEAKER related agreement. This analysis correctly predicts the presence of adjunct WH-questions.