Case Alternations in Potential Constructions in Japanese and their Semantic Implications
نویسندگان
چکیده
In potential constructions in Japanese, any argument of a base verb, whether it is an argument, an adjunct or even an argument with no thematic relation to the verb, can be marked with nominative case. Addressing the problem of various types of case alternations as well as `ga-no' conversion, this paper argues for the existence of some semantically motivated mechanism licensing nominative and genitive case, which adequately accounts for the distributions of these cases in these constructions. We also claim that there is a close connection between the morphological realization of case and the overall semantic interpretation of a sentence.
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