Abstract
It has been claimed by Hasegawa, Yoshimura, Nishigauchi, Kikuchi, Saito and Watanabe, among others, that Japanese observes subjacency in relative clause formation, question formation, topicalization, comparative deletion (all non-overt operator movements), PP-topicalization, and scrambling (overt movements). In this paper I present counterexamples to each of these claims and argue that an aboutness condition on topic-comment and focus-comment constructions not only better explains the data but also explains the fact that subjects are usually easier to relativize than non-subjects, the fact that NP-topicalization is more free than PP-topicalization and the fact that there is pressure for a "list" interpretation in multiple wh-questions.
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