Variation of Cannonical Sentence Structure in Korean & Japanese Dialects & its Implication

The main purpose of this squib is to provide a new principled account for variation of canonical sentence structure in Korean and Japanese based on the linguistic data commonly observed in some dialects of Korean and Japanese. Unlike the English case in which Comp(lementizer) such as 'that' in an embedded clause freely drops as far as the ECP (Lasnik & Saito 1992) is obeyed, some dialects of both Korean and Japanese show interesting linguistic data very different from those of English, thereby leading us to reasonably doubt the traditionally-accepted paradigm of the canonical sentence structure of CP for all languages. In this squib I propose, based on Korean & Japanese dialects and by developing the Minimal Structure Principle (MSP) ($Bo{\check{s}}kovi{\acute{c}}$ 1997, p. 25), that the cannonical structure of a sentence is not fixed, from the beginning at all, to be one single maximal category, CP. Instead, it should be decided to be either CP or IP, based on the feature of [${\pm}$markedness] and MSP, and the marked (or non-cannonical) embedded sentence needs to satisfy ECP for adjacency (or feature-licensing by the matrix verb in the MP terminology).