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Part of
Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics: Studies in honor of John B. Whitman
Edited by Kunio Nishiyama, Hideki Kishimoto and Edith Aldridge
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 250] 2018
► pp. 181–205

Chapter 9
Differential argument marking and object movement in Old Japanese

A typological perspective

| University of Tsukuba

This paper discusses object movement and its diachronic source in what Yanagida and Whitman (2009) (Y&W) label nominalized clauses in Old Japanese (OJ; 8 century). When the subject is marked by genitive ga, the ancestor of Modern Japanese nominative, the object necessarily moves over the subject, resulting in OSV. Y&W argue that OJ ga is licensed by agentive v and that OSV word order is a property of active alignment. From both theoretical and typological perspectives, this paper argues that case marking and word order variations in OJ are best analyzed as instances of the typologically well attested phenomenon of Differential Argument Marking (DAM). It is shown that object movement is a widely attested subtype of DAM. This paper proposes that the so-called Subject-in-Situ Generalization (SSG) (Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 2001) provides a unified analysis of object movement across languages.

Keywords: alignment, word order, genitive, active, nominalization, nominal hierarchy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Object movement
    • 3.1Differential Object Marking
    • 3.2Word order
    • 3.3Topicalization
    • 3.4Object movement in nominal based split languages
    • 3.5Parametrization
  • 4.A historical origin for OSV word order
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.250.10yan
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