Syntactic Position of Nominative Subject in Child Japanese

Abstract

This study investigates the syntactic position of the nominative subject in child Japanese through CHILDES. We present two pieces of evidence for licensing the relationship between T and the nominative subject. The first piece of evidence deals with nominative subjects in the right-dislocated position. Dansako (2020) argues that case particle errors of subjects in Japanese are not attested in children’s right-dislocated sentences, namely, (O)VS order, in contrast with ones in canonical word order. The subject in the right-dislocated position is correctly nominative-marked. In many analyses of this construction (e.g., Tanaka (2001)), noncanonical order is derived via the movement of dislocated elements from canonical order. If this is the case, children’s dislocated subject should at least go through Spec-TP, resulting in error-free case markers attached to the subject. The second piece of evidence is children’s obedience to the restriction of subject interpretation. In Japanese, the nominative subject in the conditional clause cannot relate to the empty subject in the matrix clause over the clause boundary. Dansako (2022b) demonstrates that child grammar can perform the interpretation of the subject as required by the TP-related restriction. Our results suggest that nominative case is assigned within TP projection even in child grammar.