Ph. D.

University of California, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A.

In Linguistics, June 2010

Ph.D. Committee: Hilda Koopman (Chair), Anoop Mahajan, Dominique Sportiche, Andrew Simpson (USC)

Dissertation Title: "Toward a Unified Analysis of the Passive in Japanese: A Cartographic Minimalist Approach"

a revised version is published as a book (see here):

• The book examines the passive voice system in Japanese, contributing to our further understanding of syntactic theory and the functioning of the passive voice cross-linguistically. Contrary to the standard view that Japanese has a couple of homophonous passive '-(r)are' morphemes, this thesis proposes a unified raising analysis of Japanese passives that assumes a single '-(r)are morpheme with invariant lexical features. It will be shown that many passives that have been alleged to lack active counterparts indeed have an active source, thus the well-adopted dichotomy, direct vs. indirect passives is not well-grounded. The book also addresses the issue of interspeaker variability, the requirement of supportive context, and their implications for differences in individual grammars.