The Nominative/Genitive Alternation in Modern Inner Mongolian Relative Clauses

This paper investigates the nominative/genitive alternation in Modem Inner Mongolian from a statistical perspective, and accounts for the different preferences of nominative or genitive subjects in relative clauses between Mongolian and Japanese from a synchronic point of view. It is proposed that finiteness of relative clauses accounts for the subject Case marking alternation. Nominal subject occurs in a finite relative clause, and genitive subject occurs in a non-finite, nominal relative clause. Our statistical study shows that nominative subjects are less preferred than their genitive counterparts in Modem Inner Mongolian. Compared to Mongolian nominative/genitive alternation, nominative subjects are more common in Japanese. It is claimed that the developments of verbal noun aspectual suffixes to finite indicative suffixes also occurred in the history of Japanese, and Japanese goes faster than Mongolian does. Aspectual suffixes have evolved into indicative suffixes in Japanese, while in Inner Mongolian it is an ongoing development.