Case marking vs. Case checking in Japanese generative grammar: An alternative proposal

Introduction* Marantz (1995) concludes the description of the Minimalist Program by saying, "Syntax reduces to a simple description of how constituents drawn from the lexicon can be combined and how movement is possible. The computational system, this simple system of composition, is constrained by a small set of economy principles, which Chomsky claims enforce the general requirement, 'do the most economical things to create structures that pass the interface conditions'... Chomsky's vision of the end of syntax should have the positive consequence of forcing syntacticians to renew their interface credentials by paying serious attention to the relevant work in phonology and semantics." The reduction of syntax forces a reevaluation of the past important work in traditional syntax, which now looks like a machine loaded down with too many functions. It also urges syntacticians to see whether or not the new machine can deal with relevant research results adequately. An attempt to recast some of the important past findings into the new framework may reveal fundamental theoretical problems. What is important is not only to see that past findings can be described and explained by the new theory but also to check whether or not the new machinery leaves out important syntactic facts as irrelevant to computation. Morphology, as part of phonology in the Minimalist Program (hereafter MP), carries a very much reduced function, although it had played an important function as a part of syntax or an interface of syntax and phonology in generative grammar up to the GB theory, called the Extended Standard Theory (EST). The nature of morphology in EST is both syntactic and phonological. As a case in point I would like to take up problems involved in its case system. This is a preliminary attempt to recast the case marking system proposed in the EST framework into that of the MP. It is not so much important to see whether or not this attempt is successful as to find out the relevance of the problems brought up by MP. This work consists of three chapters; Chapter 1 gives the survey of the past works, which reveals that the traditional case marking system cannot be maintained in the MP framework, due to the condition of inclusiveness that "no new objects are added in the course of computation apart from rearrangements of lexical properties".1 In Chapter 1 I proceed to present alternative proposals in the MP framework, and …