I have to warn you that this page is rather boring if you don't have any background in Generative Grammar, or at least some understanding of it. This is the only page where I am not really visitor-friendly...
I'm very much interested in the interface phenomena between syntax and pragmatics. Quite a bit of studies done under the name of syntax in the past will have to be re-examined and when that's done, most of them will end up receiving pragmatic solutions, in my opinion. Let me illustrate what I mean. For this page, I have to assume visitors do not necessarily have a good knowledge of Japanese. I will illustrate what I mean with examples in French. An ordinary, colloquial French sentence like (1) is interpreted as (2).
(1) Cette valise, je voyage toujours avec.
(2) Je voyage toujours avec cette valise.
In order to explain the interpretation, it was once proposed that "cette valise" in (3) be moved to the top of the sentence, Chomsky-adjoined to the node S as shown in (4).
(3)
(4)
So the meaning of (4) comes from (3). Put it differently, Structure (3) is mapped to Structure (4), and the kind of mapping done is known as "transformation" (or Move-alpha, where alpha is a major category) in the literature.
However, one can also engage in a conversation as follows:
(5) A: "Tiens! Regarde cette valise. C'est joli ! Est-ce que c'est à toi ?"
B: "Oui, j'aime cette valise-là ! Je voyage toujours avec."
Given the naturalness of "Je voyage toujours avec" in (5B), one might want to argue that Noun Phrase "Cette valise" in (4) is in fact empty and is bound to the discourse topic "cette valise". By postulating some kind of way to bind the discourse topic to Noun Phrase "Cette valise", we could supply the meaning of the empty node. So the structure could be:
(6)
My dissatisfaction with the analysis of this kind is this: the NP "e"-to-"discourse referent" link in (6) can not be syntactic and thus it can not be part of proper domain of syntax. The "avec" in (5B) is understood as "avec cette valise" because "cette valise" is the topic of the conversation. A better representation of what is going on would be, then:
(7)
We can immediately identify the empty noun "e" in the prepositional phrase in (7) discoursely. So there may be some sort of algorithm that links the empty noun to the discourse topic. The human brain does it instantaneously. Exactly what the algorithm is, we really don't know. At least we can say that the phenomenon is pragmatic and not syntactic. Put it differently, one can use "Je voyage toujours avec" in discourse although all by itself it is anomalous and thus can be hardly considered well-formed. It would be futile to propose a syntactic solution to this type of phenomena, but in my opinion, there is a lot of studies of this kind that were produced in the past.
