AMSA-150-0900
Author: Heidi Harley
Title: Subjects, Events and Licensing
Citation: Ph.D. Dissertation. MIT, Cambridge (1995)

While the notion of "subject" as a primitive of grammar is in
some way encoded in most modern syntactic theories, the cluster of syntactic
properties attributed to subjects is not a homogenous one. This thesis aims
to precisely characterize certain of these properties, partially through
an investigation of constructions where they fail to converge.
	Two of these properties are of particular interest. First, the structural
properties associated with "external arguments" are examined, that is, the
question of where thematic subjects (as opposed to clausal subjects) are
base-generated. Drawing on evidence from Japanese lexical causatives, a
"split-VP" structure is argued for, in which external arguments (Agents,
Causers) are generated in the specifier of a projection which marks the
introduction of an event argument (hence termed EventP). Below EventP are
case-checking positions for underlying objects and indirect objects (internal
arguments) as well as the projection in which internal arguments are base-generated
("BaseP"). "Verbs" on this approach consist of a "Base" head in combination
with an "Event" head, and the decomposition of verbal meaning into "primitives"
such as CAUSE, HAVE or BE is assumed. In support, a correlation is drawn
between the existence of the predicate "have" in a language and the possibility
of a double object/double complement alternation, adducing evidence from
Irish, Tagalog and Diné, as well as Japanese, Georgian and English.
	Secondly, the question of morphological nominative case is considered.
Nominative marking on an NP is typically taken to be an indicator of subjecthood,
nonetheless, there are constructions in which a nominative-marked argument
appears to be in object position. Such nominative objects in Icelandic are
examined in detail, and a mechanism for assigning morphological case is
proposed which modifies standard assumptions about the strict connection
of morphological case with structural position. Given such modification,
the question of NP-licensing is re-examined, with an eye to dispensing with
abstract case entirely; the apparent effects of abstract case assignment
(and, incidentally, Buzio^Òs Generalization) are seen to be the result of
the interaction of the mechanism governing morphological case assignment
with the Extended Projection Principle.