It seems that the bulk of my presentation will be concerned with justifying my position declared in the second paragraph of the abstract, given in [21482], repeated here.

We adopt the following thesis, put forth in Ueyama 1998, according to which the movement operations involved in the OS construction (i.e., sentences of the 'object subject order') in Japanese are not uniform, contrary to the thesis that seems to have been pursued for the past two decades by M. Saito, and a given example of the OS construction in Japanese can correspond to two distinct numerations, and hence two distinct derivations and representations. The OS order can come about as the result of the PF movement of a non-subject NP over the subject, but it can also come about with the 'base-generation' of the non-subject (such as the object) at the sentence-initial position, being related to 'its theta position' through a Predication relation with a lambda predicate containing 'the theta position' as the open position. One might suggest that the former is akin to Heavy NP shift in English, to the extent that it is analyzed as an instance of PF movement, and that the latter is not unlike what happens in the tough sentences in English.

The crucial difference between Ueyama 1998 and Saito 2003 is (i). What is meant by DL in (i) (adopting the term in Ueyama) is 'dislocated phrase', and it can be understood as corresponding to the so-called scrambled phrase.

(i) Ueyama 1998 deduces the impossibility of one DL simultaneously functioning 'as being in an A-position' and 'as being in an A'-position', while Saito 2003 does not. In fact, Saito's (2003) analysis allows of the possibility that a given DL exhibits both A-properties and A'-properties since the formal relation that underlie A-properties and the one that underlie A'-properties can be established/licensed derivationally
Ueyama 1998 thus makes a particular negative prediction while Saito 2003 does not. The bulk of my MayFest presentation will likely be concerned with the demonstration that Ueyama's hypothesis at least is not falsified, if not corroborated, and to the extent such is indeed the case, that would provide (strong) support for Ueyama's theory of the OS construction (i.e., so-called scrambling construction), as opposed to a theory such as Saito's (2003).

I think I will also be able to go over the point alluded to in the last paragraph of the abstract, also repeated here.

One might point to various arguments in the literature for the existence of formal features (strong features, the EPP feature, or the like) in Japanese. However, once we put such proposals to a minimally rigorous empirical test, checking its negative predictions, it is not clear if any such argument/hypothesis/claim remains not to be refuted/falsified/invalidated. We will provide illustration of some concrete examples. One might also wonder how valid the empirical bases are for the claims defended in this presentation, pointing to judgments reported in the literature in support of the hypotheses/claims contrary to the thesis pursued here. Among the key notions in assessing a given hypothesis and in dealing with judgmental fluctuation are falsifiability, corroboration (not in the sense of Popper), and negative predictions, and the recognition that a contrast detected in a minimal pair should be counted as significant only if the negative prediction made by the hypothesis in question is not disconfirmed. I will try to go over what is meant by this and also try to make some remarks on what role can be profitably served by research on Japanese (and other languages that share with Japanese the crucial properties noted above), given the basic correctness of the general thesis pursued here.

But I am afraid that I will not be able to address the issues of clause-boundedness and the Subjacency effects, in any depth. Emi Mukai's recent paper directly addresses those issues (and 'resumption'), and I would most likely have to refer the interested parties to her work, which I plan to upload at my HP, when it has been revised for public circulation.

The main reason for this 'change of plan' is that it seems necessary to illustrate the format of the experiment introduced in the handout posted in [21051] as well as in my abstract for the LSA 2005 Raising and Control Workshop A Major Object Analysis of the So-called Raising-to-Object Construction in Japanese . (A slightly longer version of the abstract is here.) I plan to do so, by comparing Ueyama 1998, 2002 and Saito 2003, and if I do that, I doubt that I will have enough time to discuss the concrete issues regarding clause-boundedness and the Subjacency effects.ted here.

We adopt the following thesis, put forth in Ueyama 1998, according to which the movement operations involved in the OS construction (i.e., sentences of the 'object subject order') in Japanese are not uniform, contrary to the thesis that seems to have been pursued for the past two decades by M. Saito, and a given example of the OS construction in Japanese can correspond to two distinct numerations, and hence two distinct derivations and representations. The OS order can come about as the result of the PF movement of a non-subject NP over the subject, but it can also come about with the 'base-generation' of the non-subject (such as the object) at the sentence-initial position, being related to 'its theta position' through a Predication relation with a lambda predicate containing 'the theta position' as the open position. One might suggest that the former is akin to Heavy NP shift in English, to the extent that it is analyzed as an instance of PF movement, and that the latter is not unlike what happens in the tough sentences in English.

The crucial difference between Ueyama 1998 and Saito 2003 is (i). What is meant by DL in (i) (adopting the term in Ueyama) is 'dislocated phrase', and it can be understood as corresponding to the so-called scrambled phrase.

(i) Ueyama 1998 deduces the impossibility of one DL simultaneously functioning 'as being in an A-position' and 'as being in an A'-position', while Saito 2003 does not. In fact, Saito's (2003) analysis allows of the possibility that a given DL exhibits both A-properties and A'-properties since the formal relation that underlie A-properties and the one that underlie A'-properties can be established/licensed derivationally.

Ueyama 1998 thus makes a particular negative prediction while Saito 2003 does not. The bulk of my MayFest presentation will likely be concerned with the demonstration that Ueyama's hypothesis at least is not falsified, if not corroborated, and to the extent such is indeed the case, that would provide (strong) support for Ueyama's theory of the OS construction (i.e., so-called scrambling construction), as opposed to a theory such as Saito's (2003).

I think I will also be able to go over the point alluded to in the last paragraph of the abstract, also repeated here.

One might point to various arguments in the literature for the existence of formal features (strong features, the EPP feature, or the like) in Japanese. However, once we put such proposals to a minimally rigorous empirical test, checking its negative predictions, it is not clear if any such argument/hypothesis/claim remains not to be refuted/falsified/invalidated. We will provide illustration of some concrete examples. One might also wonder how valid the empirical bases are for the claims defended in this presentation, pointing to judgments reported in the literature in support of the hypotheses/claims contrary to the thesis pursued here. Among the key notions in assessing a given hypothesis and in dealing with judgmental fluctuation are falsifiability, corroboration (not in the sense of Popper), and negative predictions, and the recognition that a contrast detected in a minimal pair should be counted as significant only if the negative prediction made by the hypothesis in question is not disconfirmed. I will try to go over what is meant by this and also try to make some remarks on what role can be profitably served by research on Japanese (and other languages that share with Japanese the crucial properties noted above), given the basic correctness of the general thesis pursued here.

But I am afraid that I will not be able to address the issues of clause-boundedness and the Subjacency effects, in any depth. Emi Mukai's recent paper directly addresses those issues, and I would most likely have to refer the interested parties to her work, which I plan to upload at my HP, when it has been revised for public circulation.