This argues for a dependency analysis of case assignment, according to which the morphological realization of structural case is dependent upon the realization of other structural cases within a clause, rather than the standard approach according to which a particular structural case is associated with a particular position or case assigner. This paper provides a unified treatment of the various uses of the Japanese causative morpheme -sase within a Minimalist framework. The breakdown of verbs into an upper VP shell representing eventiveness and a lower shell representing the aspectual and stative component of the verb's meaning provides the necessary structural representation to capture the generalization. The upper part of a VP shell represents the eventiveness of an eventive verb, and this position is where all Agent arguments are generated, a proposal along the lines of Kratzer 1996. Late insertion of lexical items permits a unified treatment of Japanese syntactic and lexical causatives.
Theta structure is argued to be epiphenomenal to event structure.
Evidence from adverbs and psychological predicates also supports the decompositional view of verbs argued for here.