Checking Theory and Dative Subject Constructions in Japanese and Korean

This paper attempts to elucidate the syntactic properties of the so- called "Dative Subject Constructions (DSC)", which had recently been attracting much attention, because they pose some very interesting problems to the theory of Case and agreement. DSCs occur in Japanese and Korean, and it has been reported in the literature that the dative-marked subject in these constructions shows some syntactically peculiar behaviors in terms of Case and grammatical functions (GFs). In this paper, I will take a closer look at DSCs in Japanese and Korean, and then, under the assumptions of the minimalist framework, I will try to give a consistent account, with the aid of the Agr-less checking theory, of their syntactic peculiarities.

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