Nominative subjects can’t move to the left periphery in Japanese
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Abstract
This paper attempts to argue convincingly that nominative subjects in Japanese cannot move to Spec-C if they are phonetically realized; in fact, they should remain in Spec-T from the viewpoint of the nominative case assignment mechanism in Japanese.
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* Parts of this paper was presented at WAFL 17, the content of which will be published in the proceedings paper as Moritake and Nishioka (to appear). This paper is a revised and extended version of these materials. We are grateful to Mamoru Saito, Shigeru Miyagawa, Yoichi Miyamoto, Masako Maeda, Xue Bai, Yuqiao Du, and all the participants at WAFL 17 for their invaluable suggestions and comments. We are also indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Our thanks also go to Carey Benom for suggesting stylistic improvements. Needless to say, all remaining errors and inadequacies are of course our own. This work is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP21K00586 and JP23KJ1687.
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