So, the class ended without my really having time to say much about the homework that I’d thrown together (at great expense and at the last minute).

Mostly, what I had in mind is outlined on the homework assignment itself, but I did want to say something more about the binding test, since it’s actually a pretty useful test for syntax and semantics.

The basic idea is that if you have a quantifier like every girl and a pronoun somewhere lower in the tree like her, there is an interpretation under which the referent of her kind of takes each girl in turn. So, in something like Every girl finished her homework, the meaning of this is that any given girl finished her own homework, and this is true for all the girls. (There is an irrelevant interpretation where you point at, say, Mary, and the sentence means that every girl finished Mary’s homework, but we don’t care about that interpretation. We only care about the interpretation where “her varies with the girls”).

There are a couple of things that this kind of test is useful for, in terms of identifying relationships in the syntactic structure (since, it turns out, that you can only get this interpretation if the quantifier is higher in the tree than the bound pronoun), but what I want to focus on specifically is the ability of a bound pronoun to rule out quotations.

If you say something like “John said Mary left”, this could mean either that John said something that communicated the proposition that Mary left, or that John said exactly the following words: “Mary left.” The latter interpretation involves a quotation.

When we are embedding one sentence inside another in Japanese, we don’t know from the outset for sure whether the embedded clause is a quotation or not. What I want you to test for in the homework is whether an embedded clause can have a topic or a focus, but we need to make sure that the test sentence doesn’t just contain a quotation (since of course a quotation can have a topic and/or a focus).

The kind of test I have in mind is not entirely dissimilar to using the pronoun I as the subject of an embedded clause. If you say “John said I left” then the interpretation where it is John who allegedly left involves a quotation (John said exactly these words: “I left”), and the interpretation where I am the one who is alleged to have left, then it is a regular embedded clause.

So what I have in mind for the homework is that you create sentences with a topic, or a focus (using the methods I suggested there, “As for X…” or “It is X that…”) that also contains a pronoun that is bound by a quantifier in a higher clause you embed the sentence into. That is, an example of this without topic or focus would be “Every girl said (that) she left.” If this is interpreted as meaning that any given girl said that she herself left, then she is a bound pronoun (bound by every girl) and the embedded clause cannot be a quotation. (Incidentally, it already probably can’t be a quotation if you use the word that when embedding, but never mind that, it’s more interesting to create the full test with bound pronouns.)

Two further things: It might not be simple to create natural-sounding examples, even if we conclude that it is possible to have embedded topics and foci, but I don’t think it will be that challenging. And, I have also violated the cardinal rule of homework assignments, which is that I have handed this out without working out the answer myself, so there might conceivably be some unseen snag you’ll run up against, but I hope not.

Ultimately, the idea here is really to test the plausibility of the idea that topic/focus “articulation” of a sentence is something that can’t really exist in an embedded clause. So, if you can’t find any examples that work well, then perhaps you have shown that embedded clauses can’t have topics/foci. And if you can find reasonable examples, then you will have shown that embedded clauses can have topics/foci. At least in English, but also in principle.