Alignment and word order in Old Japanese

要旨

This paper argues that Old Japanese (eighth century) had split alignment with nominative-accusative alignment in main clauses and active alignment in nominalized clauses. The main arguments for active alignment in nominalized clause come from ga-marking of active subjects and the distribution of two verbal prefixes: i-for active predicates and sa- for inactive predicates (cf. Yanagida In: Hasegawa (ed.) Nihongo no shubun gensho [Main clause phenomena in Japanese] 2007b). We review the treatment of non-accusative alignment and argue that active alignment should be analyzed as as a distinct type. We propose a formal analysis of active alignment in nominalized clauses in Old Japanese. The external argument is assigned inherent case spelled out as ga in situ in Spec v. Object arguments are licensed by several distinct mechanisms including incorporation (Yanagida In: Miyamoto (ed.) MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 2007a) and case assignment by a functional head above vP. The latter accounts for the distinctive O wo S ga V word order of OJ nominalized clauses noted by Yanagida (J. of East Asian Linguistics 2006). Inability to assign object case is a property of [nominal] v as proposed by Miyagawa (Structure and case marking in Japanese. Syntax and Semantics vol. 22 1989). We discuss the diachronic origins of the OJ active alignment system and point out that it exemplifies a cross-linguistically attested pattern of non-accusative alignment in clauses that originate from nominalizations.

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