Some Notes on extraction from Noun Phrases

The resulting representation is, however, hardly acceptable in Japanese. This state of affairs appears curious at first glance, because Japanese exhibits, when compared with English, more freedom with respect to the ordering of constituents. A typical example that substantiates this is scrambling, which will be taken up shortly below. The present work tries to shed some light on this peculiar nature of leftward movement in Japanese. This paper is organized as follows: In section 2, I introduce the idea presented by Fukui (1993, 2006) concerning the directionality of movement operations. Section 3 demonstrates that extraction from NP is not allowed in Japanese, in contrast to the rightward extraction from NP or extraposition in English. In section 4, I deal with other cases of “optional” movement operations in Japanese, taking the relevant morphological markings also into consideration, and point out that the ban on extraction from NP in