Nominative-genitive conversion and agreement in Japanese: A cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract

This paper argues that Japanese has the same abstract agreement system as French, on the basis of comparison between Nominative-Genitive Conversion in Japanese and Stylistic Inversion in French. Since these two constructions share essentially the same properties which are explained in terms of the structural Case system involving agreement, it follows that Japanese also has the Case system mediated by feature checking under the Spec-head relation.