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It is well known that subjective-が can have exhaustive-listing properties, implying that the sentence applies no further within the universe of discourse than the subject:

私がした。-> “I'm the one who did it”

However, how does this transfer onto a nominative object, for instance:

私はあなたが好きだ。

Can this object still have exhaustive listing function and thus mean “You're the one I love.”, and what of a dative subject:

私に分かっている。

Can this mean “I'm the one who understands it.” opposed to merely “I understand it.”?

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    I'm not sure what you intended with the last sentence. It has no が in it.
    – aguijonazo
    Commented Apr 16 at 23:15
  • @aguijonazo I was wondering if dative subjects could also indicate exhaustive listing, or if only nominative subjects can.
    – Zorf
    Commented Apr 17 at 1:06
  • There are only "nominative objects" and "dative subjects" after translating into an English frame of reference. For instance, grammatically speaking, the に in 私にわかっている marks the agent. Commented Apr 17 at 17:29
  • @EiríkrÚtlendi What makes you say that? There are grammatical tests in Japanese that show how they behave subject-like or object-like syntactically. Commented Apr 18 at 0:27
  • @DariusJahandarie, I wrote a longer post about this at japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/4991/dative-subjects/…. Commented Apr 18 at 0:36

1 Answer 1

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私はあなたが好きだ。

The grammatical terms aside, this sentence in itself doesn't mean "you are the one I like." If you want it to mean that, you would have to stress あなた in speech.

The first が in the sentence below does have the exhaustive listing property, but its effect is on 私, of course.

あなたが好きだ。


私に分かっている。

This is not a very natural sentence by itself though it may appear in a dependent clause as in:

私に分かっていることは〜だ。

As a standalone sentence, what you meant would be expressed by either:

私は分かっている。

or

私が分かっている。

This が has the exhaustive listing property as you would expect.

By the way, the following sentence sounds natural.

私に分かる。

There clearly is a hidden subject here and that thing is understandable to me. I don't think this "dative subject" thing applies here.

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