The position of nominative NPs in Japanese: Evidence for nominative NPs in-situ

Abstract

This paper presents some new data of the Japanese language, which shows that the nominative NP, particularly the nominative subject, can stay in-situ and that in a certain case, it cannot move to the Spec of TP. These examples come from a certain type of idioms with ditransitive verbs given by Miyagawa and Tsujioka (2004). Based on their observation that some idioms cannot allow displacement of their parts, we will see that in such idioms, passivization is possible only if the nominative NP (the subject) remains in-situ. This supports the analysis that the nominative subject does not have to move to the Spec of TP to satisfy a feature of T, for example, the EPP (Fukui 1986, Kuroda 1988, among others). This paper makes a stronger claim: At least in overt syntax, the nominative subject in our examples may not move to the Spec of TP. We will further observe that the same is true of the genitive NP of so-called ga-no (nominative-genitive) conversion. The examples with the idiom support the analysis which claims that the genitive NP in ga-no conversion stays in VP in overt syntax (Watanabe 1994, 1996; Miyagawa 1997, 2011).