The base order of Goal and Theme in Japanese double complement unaccusatives

Abstract

This study investigates the base-generated order of internal arguments in Japanese double complement unaccusative (DCU) verbs, which contain both a Goal and a Theme argument. Because of the relatively free word order of Japanese and the EPP feature on v, surface configurations of DCUs (Goal-Theme-V and Theme-Goal-V) do not directly reflect the base structure. To address this issue, this study examines verbal nouns that share their Root with DCU verbs to determine the base word order. Since scrambling within nominal projections is generally ungrammatical, the relative order of arguments inside verbal noun phrases provides crucial insights into the base-generated word order. The Goal-Theme order (e.g., ofisu-e-no tegami-no toochaku ‘the letter’s arrival at the office’) is consistently more acceptable than its counterpart structure, Theme-Goal, suggesting that the Goal argument is base-generated in a structurally higher position than the Theme argument. To validate this conclusion, this study conducted a formal acceptability judgment experiment with 36 native speakers of Japanese who rated transitive and DCU noun phrases that varied in argument order. The results confirmed that the Goal-Theme order in DCU nouns is more acceptable than the Theme-Goal order, supporting the hypothesis that the Goal argument occupies a structurally higher position than the Theme in the base structure. These findings facilitate our syntactic understanding of unaccusative constructions in Japanese and empirically support the use of nominal structures to infer verb argument hierarchies.