Bound Nouns, Ellipsis or Pro-form?

Abstract

This paper argues that an alleged ellipsis phenomenon in Standard Japanese (Saito, Lin and Murasugi 2008, Maeda and Takahashi 2013, inter alia), in fact, involves a pro-form in line with Bae (2012) and Saruwatari (2015). The pro-form analysis is superior in that it explains not only Standard Japanese cases, but also Nagasaki Japanese and Korean phenomena (Bae 2012, Saruwatari 2015). Further, extending the proposal in Kim (2011), I claim that kes in Korean, no in Standard Japanese, and to in Nagasaki Japanese can be best analyzed by movement from N to small n, which is induced by grammaticalization process. This movement option has more explanatory power than Saruwatri (2015) given that those bound nouns show typical characteristic of grammaticalization.