The Syntax of Subjects

Three questions are addressed about the subject in Japanese: (i) What is the subject? (ii) What is the topic in syntax (not semantics)? (iii) Where is the marked external argument in syntax? About (i), I adopt the widely accepted view that the subject is only a relative notion; SPEC in the X-bar system of the phrase structure. The SPEC is restricted in number in a clause, and so is the subject. The multiple subject construction is discussed in relation to this (Chapters 2 and 7), because there appear to be infinitely many subjects in this construction. This casts doubt on the uniform cross-linguistic treatment of the subject and the phrase structure. The existence of this construction, however, does not show that constraints on the Japanese phrase structure should be loosened, as recent studies on parametric syntax (e.g. Fukui (1986), Kuroda (1988)) suggest. It only shows the deep/surface discrepancy on the number of subjects created by movement to the nominative position. At D-Structure, the number is severely restricted, and many multiple subject sentences show the restriction even on the surface. At D-Structure, the structure of Japanese is nothing special, and so is the notion subject. The topic -wa-phrase in Japanese is discussed next (Chapters 5 and 6), because the topic and the subject in Japanese overlap with each other in the range of phenomena they cover. Despite its semantic peculiarity, the topic in Japanese is only an ordinary argument, period. It adds no barrier to syntactic movement, nor does it need a special "topic position" as previous analyses suggest (e.g. Kuno (1973), Chomsky (1977)). An analysis of the -wa-phrase as something special in syntax is simply wrong. Finally, (iii) is addressed (Chapters 3 and 4), because the external argument is the element regarded as the subject in other languages, unlike ones relevant