Sometimes conjuncts, sometimes adjuncts: te-clauses in Japanese and the C-T relation

The aim of this paper is to provide novel support for Chomsky’s (2000) conception of C-T relation by examining Japanese te-clauses. Te-clauses, as often noted, can function as either adverbials or clausal conjuncts. We first show that while a te-clause without an overt subject may adjoin to the root syntactic tree, a te-clause that contains a lexical subject cannot, but can only be coordinated with the root syntactic tree. Then we argue that this correlation between the presence/absence of a lexical nominative subject in te-clauses and the interpretative (in)variability of them follows straightforwardly from Chomsky’s (2000) C-T dependency, put together with a fact about te-clauses that we independently establish, i.e. that, whether finite or nonfinite, they are always TPs.