1 THE PARAMETER OF ARGUMENT ELLIPSIS: THE VIEW FROM KAQCHIKEL * KOICHI OTAKI 1 KOJI SUGISAKI 1 NORIAKI YUSA 2 MASATOSHI KOIZUMI 3 Mie University 1 Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University 2 Tohoku University 3 1 Introduction It has been observed since at least Oku (1998) that null subjects in Japanese behave quite differently from null subjects in Spanish, in that the former allows sloppy-identity interpretation, as well as the strict-identity interpretation. 1 (1) a. Hanako-wa [ zibun-no teian-ga saiyousareru to ] omotteiru. 2 Hanako-TOP self-GEN proposal-NOM accepted-be that think ‘Hanako1 thinks that her1 proposal will be accepted.’ b. Taroo-mo [ e saiyousareru to ] omotteiru. Taroo-also accepted-be that think Lit. ‘Taroo also thinks that e will be accepted.’ * We are immensely grateful to Lolmay Pedro García Matzar, Juan Esteban Ajsivinac Sián, and Filiberto Patal Majzul, for providing us with the Kaqchikel data reported in this paper. We are equally indebted to Yoshiho Yasugi for helping us create and analyze relevant Kaqchikel sentences. We would also like to thank the audiences at the 143th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan and the Linguistics Colloquium at Nanzan University, as well as the following people: Hanako Fujino, Takuya Kubo, Hajime Ono, José Riqueros Morante, and Mamoru Saito. All remaining errors are of course our own. This work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) (# 222220001, PI: Masatoshi Koizumi). 1 The same observation also holds for Korean. See Kim (1999) and Saito and An (2010) for relevant discussion. 2 Abbreviations used in the glosses are: TOP (= Topic), GEN (= Genitive), NOM (= Nominative), ACC (= Accusative), DAT (= Dative), ABS (= Absolutive), ERG (= Ergative), COMP (= Complementizer), SG (= Singular), PL (= Plural), FUT (= Future), PRES (= Present), IMPF (= Imperfective), PRFV (= Perfective), AOR (= Aorist), ACT (= Active), CLF (= Classifier), NEG (= Negation).