Subjects and Predication in Korean and Japanese

The assumption that nominative case is assigned by INFL has proved fruitfu l in explaining the distribution of nominative case in a number of languages , and in particular in accounting for the differences between the nominative and other cases. Korea n and Japanese , however , provide evidence that this method of caseassignment to the subject is not universal. In this paper we argue that nominative case-assignment in Korean and Japanese is independent of INFL, and claim that -ka 1 -ga marks the syntactic subject of a predication st ructure independent of the argument structure of the clause. Among the advantages of this unified treatment of -ka 1 -ga mark ing is that it leads to an account of the multiple nominative construction found in both languages and to a principled explanation of the impossibility of this const ruction in the European languages. Further, we argue that the abi lity to 'Iicense non-theta-marked lexical NPs by predication alone is not unique to Korean and Japanese: Non-argument non-expletive predication subjects can be found in English as well.