Japanese has a counterpart of the English Exceptional Case-marking (ECM) construction: Raising-to-Object construction (RTO). Over the years various analyses and proposals have been presented for this construction, reflecting the theoretical frameworks of the times. But there still remain some unsolved/challenging phenomena, which may serve as tests for the principles of UG. Especially when coupled with Indeterminate Pronoun Binding and bound pronoun interpretation, RTO shows peculiar behavior which has challenged previous analyses. The aim of this paper is to show that these peculiarities can be straightforwardly explained, given Reuland’s (2001, 2011) Agree-based Construal, under the assumption that φ-feature agreement is involved in Japanese Case licensing.

The paper chooses the reduction of unstressed vowels as a typical example in comparing constraints with rules, two distinct devices to account for phonological patterns employed respectively in Burzio (2000) and Positional Function Theory. Based on the inadequacy of Burzio’s (2000) proposal, the paper examines whether Positional Function Theory can explain stress patterns, especially those that have posed problems for Burzio (2000). Along with this discussion, the paper also studies ordering relations among Positional Functions by use of the two principles in Chomsky (1967). We agree with Chomsky (1967) that linear ordering does exist, but we argue that not all rules are strictly linearly ordered.

This paper examines the absolutive/genitive alternation in Selayarese, an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Selayar in the Indonesian province of Sulawesi Selatan, and attempts to elucidate the mechanism behind the case marker alternation. Based on the data we collected, we will argue (i) that the genitive marker is licensed by the adnominal form of a predicate in Selayarese, (ii) that not only XP movement, but also clitic movement, deletes intermediate Comps in Selayarese, and (iii) that clitic movement is not restricted to control structure, and can be long distance in Selayarese.