Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This paper aims to deepen our understanding of constructions with a quote followed by an accusative object in Japanese. We propose to argue that the structural configuration of such constructions is analogous to argument doubling in the sense of Saito (2017, 2024). In constructions with argument doubling, two accusative objects are construed as arguments of a single predicate and assumed to receive the same theta-role. It will be shown that syntactic and semantic properties exhibited by constructions with a quote and an accusative object are naturally explained by identifying them as argument doubling. We also explore the implications of our analysis, suggesting that the unavailability of their English counterparts stems from the fundamental differences between Japanese and English—that is, the presence or absence of phi-feature agreement and weak heads comparable to overt case-markers.