Two types of Nominative Objects in Japanese

The purpose of this paper is to argue that there are licensing conditions for the nominative Case on the objects in Japanese, and to consider the implications of the results. We first show that it is not the case that all NPs with the nominative Case marker -ga undergo Nominative-Genitive Conversion, and the resistance of the case conversion is related to focus. We claim that there are two ways for licensing Nominative Objects in Japanese. One is that the nominative Case on the object NP is licensed in-situ by T via Agree. The other is that it is licensed by a functional head which is structurally higher than T under Spec-head configuration.