ABSTRACT
This chapter integrates Japanese object honorication within a larger crosslinguistic context, and provides a principled explanation for an otherwise puzzling property: the fact that direct object honorication is blocked in the presence of a dative argument. Following a well-established tradition in the generative literature, honorication is here treated as a case of agreement, but, unlike previous approaches, which rely on Spec-Head congurations, Agree is shown to be able to capture (object) agreement in a more straightforward manner. The blocking effect of dative elements is a reex of a more general locality constraint, ‘defective intervention’ (a special case of minimality), and is related to Person-Case Constraint effects.
