Falsifiability and repeatability in generative grammar: a case study of anaphora and scope dependency in Japanese

This paper aims to illustrate how we might proceed to attain repeatability and falsifiability in generative grammar, on the basis of discussion of concrete empirical materials in Japanese, such as bound variable anaphora, quantifier scope, and reconstruction effects. After critically examining and improving on the major empirical arguments for the standard view of the phrase structure of Japanese, I propose that a certain type of bound variable anaphora is based on a formal relation, Formal Dependency (FD), between two argument positions. The structural condition on FD and its interpretive consequence proposed here not only enable us to account for the fluctuation and instability of speakersʹ judgments but also lead us to predict a number of hitherto unnoticed correlations with regard to the (un)availability of a bound variable construal. The paper attains a significantly higher level of repeatability than before, states explicitly how its proposal can be falsified, and stresses the critical importance of making a rigorous attempt to articulate how every theoretical concept is related to the rest of the theory as well as to the native speakerʹs linguistic intuitions so as to be able to make definite predictions and ensure the falsifiability of our hypotheses.