SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In the following thesis, the term "case" is used in a very wide sense. I will first discuss the peculiar characteristics of the case functions in Japanese which do not answer to the traditional notions of them. In view of the fact that no existing theories provide an adequate description of the cases, the main concern of this thesis is to develop a new grammar of Japanese which will provide some formal, syntactic basis to explain (i) how the case markers are derived and associated with their nominals, and (ii) how they acquire their functional meanings. An initial hypothesis is made on the relationship between certain case markers and the corresponding sentence connectives, on the basis of close similarities of their semantic functions. Then, a set of syntactic rules are constructed to account for the development of the case-marked nominals from their underlying sentence structures. Subsequently, the hypothesis is tested on the two cases, the "topicalizing" wa and "contrastive" ga, as well as the "uncertain" case ka. Finally, in conjunction with the transformational introduction of the case markers into the noun phrases, the parallel introduction of their related sentence connectives into the sentences are investigated, along with a number of semantic constraints on their occurrences.