Differential subject marking and its demise in the history of Japanese

The subject of various types of subordinate or nominalized clauses in Old Japanese (700–
800) is marked in one of three different ways: with the postpositional particle ga, no or
zero. This paper argues that the opposition between case marked and unmarked subjects fit
into cross-linguistically well attested patterns of differential subject marking (DSM). Follow-
ing Woolford (2008), it shows that the syntactic and semantic characteristics of these case
marking patterns reveal thatOJ displays two kinds of DSM effects which are associated with
distinct grammatical levels. This paper also examines three possible scenarios for the loss
of DSM, which occurred in Early Middle Japanese (EMJ 800–1200). TheOJ and EMJ data
suggest that case systems do not simply shift from one alignment pattern to another, as
sometimes assumed (cf. Harris & Campbell 1995: 258). Instead, the morphological features
of individual case markers change incrementally over time, ultimately giving rise to global
changes in the overall system.