Introduction

In this book, I have assembled fi ve topics that I have worked on over the past thirty years, topics that center primarily on Japanese but with reference

also to a variety of other languages. Each topic comprises something unusual that is found in Japanese, although by no mean limited to Japanese, and the topics all relate in varying degrees to issues of case, argument structure, and word order. Each topic is presented as a pairing of an “earlier” published work and a new work that extends the earlier work, including responses to other linguists’ criticisms of the original analysis. I have “earlier” in quotations because, while some of the previously published chapters date back to the 1980s, others are quite new, as in the case of Chapter 5 on nominativegenitive conversion, which is in fact a 2011 article (but is based on work done much earlier). In writing the new chapters, I made it a point to summarize parts of the original work su ciently, sometimes quite substantially, in order for the analysis in the new work to make sense.