Deverbal psych nominals and nominative-accusative object case alternation in Japanese: an experimental study

Abstract Japanese psychological nouns (psych nouns) suki ‘like’ and kirai ‘dislike’ mark their objects with nominative or accusative case, but it is unclear what circumstances make accusative objects acceptable. Two acceptability judgment experiments manipulating object case, object animacy, and the psych nouns’ syntactic environment (copular, inchoative, relative clause) show significantly lower acceptability of accusative than nominative objects in copular and relative clauses, but no significant difference in inchoative clauses. A proposed account for these findings is that psych nouns can be nominalized VoicePs, in which case their projections contain external and event arguments and their objects are accusative-licensed, or nominalized VPs, in which case no external or event argument is available, and their objects are caseless and marked with nominative as the default case. The experiments also reveal a significant interaction between object animacy and case with suki ‘like’, suggesting the possibility that this is an emerging differential object-marking. (148)