Case valuation in Ga/No Conversion in Japanese*

This paper explicates the mechanism of the nominative (ga) and genitive (no) alternation (so-called ga/no conversion) in Japanese, focusing on the fact that the genitive (unlike the nominative) subject cannot be followed by the accusative object (transitivity restriction: TR). It is demonstrated that the TR is derived as labeling failure in the labeling analysis proposed by Chomsky (2013, 2015) with some extensions involving the Case/case valuation mechanism.  The comparison between standard Japanese (SJ) and Kumamoto Japanese (KJ), a dialect spoken in Kyushu reveals that the parametric difference in C with regard to the existence of the nominal feature [+N] can explain the differences of the distribution of the genitive subjects between SJ and KJ, and implies the position of the second nominative subject/object in multiple nominative and nominative object constructions.