Abstract
This paper investigates the morphological structure of the so-called subject honorific form o-X ni naru in Japanese. There are two types of the morphological analysis of the form: one is to treat X as a verb (Harada (1976)), and the other is to consider that X is a (gerundive) noun (Toribio (1990), Ivana and Sakai (2003, 2004), Takita (2003)). In this paper, we present new data, showing that X should be a verb, not a noun. As a consequence, we suggest that the form o-X ni naru does not show 'true' subject agreement.
