THE CRITERION OF MOVEMENT IN JAPANESE NPs

The purpose of this paper is to prove that the process of definiteness in Japanese is not a hazardous one, but it is deeply motivated by syntactic phenomenology. As a matter of fact, we will show that there are certain restrictions at stake which argue in favor of our thesis, and these restrictions are further backed up by syntactic phenomena that determine the projections. One such phenomenon is the criterion of movement, which can be observed in the case of post-nominal phrases. One domain of research will be the pre-nominal NC which we will show it allows ellipsis, much in the opinion of Watanabe (2006). This demonstration will help us with our thesis in that it supports the point of view that definiteness can occur in articleless languages like Japanese, which exhibits a large plethora of linguistically heterogenous methods for the expression of definite or indefinite Noun Phrase.