Variations of double nominative in Korean and Japanese

A personal note. Once Sebastian Löbner and I tried to climb Mount Fuji, the king of mountains. Because of heavy rainfall, we were forced to turn back, and ended in a sauna with a sake bar. The double ascent had became a kind of double passivity; and both of us were disappointed by this failure. The king of cases is the nominative; a double nominative has two kings of diUerent descent, sometimes emerging in the passive voice (Leideform in German). This doubling experience made me ultimately decide to write this article. An observation. The double nominative is a very popular subject for Japanese and Korean linguists. There are, presumably, hundreds of papers discussing how it interacts with various Velds of Japanese and Korean syntax, mostly parallel in these languages. Not wrongly, Japanese and Korean linguists consider the double nominative to be a unique feature of their languages. A prejudice. A double nominative is not spectacular in itself. Some linguists believe that nominative is assigned in a speciVc context, say SpecT. In that case, one has to ask: and what assigns the second nominative? Alternatively one might believe that nominative is the default case (often unmarked), and so a double nominative may be more frequent than was previously believed. In many languages, if (for some reason) accusative is blocked for an object, nominative becomes the automatic case instead by default. A brief abstract. In this paper, various types of alternations bringing about double nominatives are discussed. Nominatives in particular invite focus or topic interpretations, dependent on further circumstances. They also result when more complex structures are formed by extraction. Sometimes, double accusatives and double genitives with similar functions are found. These case-doubling

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