Strong uniformity and ga/no conversion

Abstract

We will look at ga/no Conversion in Japanese from the perspective of Strong Uniformity, which is a concrete implementation of Chomsky's (2001) Uniformity Principle that is proposed in Miyagawa (2010). We begin with the assumption that every language contains the same set of grammatical features; these features include the discourse features of topic and focus, and they all initially occur on C. The difference between an agreement-based language such as English and a discourse-configurational language such as Japanese is in the feature that is inherited by T: in the English-Type, the agreement feature is inherited by T while in the Japanese-Type the discourse features are inherited by T. We will look at how this system interacts with case marking in Japanese, particularly with the case alternation of ga/no Conversion.