This article presents a syntactic account of the spray/load alternation inudJapanese (e.g., nuru ‘smear’, tsumeru ‘pack’, etc.,). Fukui, Miyagawa and Tennyud(1985) claim that the alternation verbs show the double object structure under audsingle VP node; namely both the Material (i.e., something that is painted) and theudLocation (i.e., somewhere that is painted) participants are co-sisters of the verb.udWhen the Material participant is affected, it will be realized as the direct object ofudthe verb. On the other hand, when the Location is (completely) affected, it will beudrealized as the direct object of the verb. I build an account on their intuition that theudMaterial and the Location elements are thematically connected with the lexical verbudwithin the binary branching hypothesis (Kayne 1994, among others); thus, they areudarguments of VP. But this structure is valid only for the ni-variant where theudMaterial is the single sister of VP. In the structure of the de-variant, the Location is audsingle sister of VP but the Material element is a PP, merging above VP. Under thisudview, the two syntactic alternants are available because they are derived fromuddifferent numeration arrays. The present analysis minimizes the burden on theudsyntax by eliminating the affectedness condition for determining argumentuddistribution of spray/load verbs in Japanese.
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