Root vs. n. A study of Japanese light verb construction and its implications for nominal architecture

Noun Incorporation (NI) in Japanese has been treated as an instance of head movement in the previous literature. In this paper, I argue that NI is not in fact an instance of syntactic movement, but rather, it is a direct Merge of a root (Pesetsky 1995) and the light verb. I claim that NI and its non-NI counterpart have quite different structures: in NI, a root merging with the light verb su ‘do’ constitutes a verb as a whole, whereas in non-NI, a root first merges with an n and then the root-n complex is combined with the light verb. This structural difference brings about quite interesting consequences both from syntactic and phonological point of views.