Nominative Object

This article presents a study of sentences in which the object is marked with the nominative case-marker ga (the nominative object construction), and outlines major grammatical properties of the nominative-object construction in Japanese. It then describes how the case and scope properties of the nominative object can be explained within the broad framework of current generative grammar, and considers their theoretical implications. Two families of analyses have been proposed to account for the generalization: movement approaches and direct merge approaches. The most crucial difference between the movement approaches and direct merger approaches is that the former posits an object trace in the embedded VP but the latter does not. It is suggested that the nominative object, along with the nominative subject, moves to TP to satisfy the EPP requirement of T.