The Subject Raising (SR) in Japanese is an A-movement across a CPboundary. It remains unclear why such a movement is possible without violating the Phase Impenetrability Condition. To answer this question, it is proposed in this article that the head of the embedded CP in the SR construction undergoes incorporation to the selecting V. It is argued that this proposal not only solves the above mentioned problem but also account for (i) the otherwise systematic locality effects on A-movement in Japanese, (ii) the otherwise unexplained behavior of the indeterminate pronoun in the embedded subject position, and (iii) the fact that the embedded clause cannot have a temporal reference independent of the matrix clause.

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Harada (1971) argued some forty five years ago that the Japanese phenomenon called ''Nominative/Genitive Conversion'' (NGC) was undergoing a syntactic change, which was detected as idiolectal variations. Synchronically, Miyagawa (2011) argues that the NGC is not a free alternation but that more stative predicates are more likely to accept a Genitive subject. However, no one has ever proposed an argument that bridges the synchronic preference for ''stativity'' of the NGC and its diachronic syntactic change, which is characterized as ''stativization.'' In this article, we will show that the diachronic syntactic change has been in progress at least for the last 100 years. It will be shown that the semantic ''stativization'' is an epiphenomenon of the syntactic microparametric change which we refer to as ''clause shrinking,'' or a change in the syntactic size of the Genitive Subject Clause (GSC) from CP to TP to vP to VP/AP. Moreover, we will explain how such a drastic language change have actually influenced language acquisition for children who were born in different time periods, by integrating Kayne's (2000) microparametric syntax, Snyder's (2017) theory of competition between incompatible constructions, Lightfoot and Westergard's (2009) micro-cue analysis of language acquisition, Manzini and Wexler's (1987) Subset Principle, and Bošković (1997) Minimal Structure Principle.

The relation between word-formation and syntax and whether they form distinct domains of grammar or not has been discussed controversially in different theoretical frameworks. The answer to this question is closely connected to the languages under discussion, among other things, because languages seem to differ considerably in this regard. The discussion in this paper focuses on nominal compounds and phrases. On the basis of a great variety of data from a total of 14 European languages, it is argued that the relation between compounds and phrases, and, more generally, between word formation and syntax, should be characterized not in terms of a categorical but instead in terms of a gradient distinction.

In English, there are a couple of words whose categorial status is murky, the most notable of which is near. It is sometimes referred to as a preposition (Svenonius (2010)), as a transitive adjective (Maling (1983)), or as an intransitive adjective whose PP complement happens to be filled by an empty P (Kayne (2005)). The first aim of this article is to show that the three analyses are all correct synchronically in that they represent a different stage of grammaticalization on the cline from transitive adjective to intransitive adjective to preposition, on the basis of the newly discovered fact (i) that the semantic gradability of near began a sharp declination from the late 19th century, (ii) that its morphological compatibility with the preposition to also began a sharp declination from the same period, and (iii) that its collocation with the adverb right became possible around the same period, among others. The second aim of this article is to provide a syntactic analysis of the grammaticalization of near, with recourse to the insights put forth by Waters (2009) as to the grammaticalization of inside from N to Axial Part to P.