Japanese and Subject Prominent Languages such as PDE. Interestingly enough,
Proto-Indo European is supposed to be a Topic Prominent Language. It entails
that English changed from a Topic Prominent Language to a Subject Prominent
Language in the course of its history. In this chapter, such change is recaptured
as a structural change (the rise of PredP).
22 See Hosaka (2014a) for the dynamic feature of the FP structure.
23 See Chomsky (2008, 2012a, b, 2013) among others.
24 Baker’s following remarks are worth mentioning:
However, it is also true that if a functor takes more than one argument, it
must have some way to tell which argument is which; this is necessary in order
to distinguish restaurant reviews (“Man eats shark”) from suspense movies
(“Shark eats man”). The UTAH performs this function of distinguishing the
different arguments of the verb by way of virtually the only method available
in Chomsky’s very spare system: it “merges” the arguments into the represen-
tation at systematically different points. Therefore, there does seem to be a
place for the UTAH within the limits of “virtual conceptual necessity.”
(Ba ker 1997: 122)
In this chapter, case and FPs at LoC are assumed to identify thematic roles
projected at LoT on the basis of UTAH.
25 There have been long-standing debates concerning the correspondence between
meanings, case and grammatical relations in the fi eld of generative grammar as
well as relational grammar. In this chapter, assuming that case which is realized
through morphology or structure exists for the purpose of identifying thematic
roles at LoC, it is possible to explain language structures without referring to
grammatical relations.
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