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Abstract

This thesis applies Montague's theory of grammar to a fragment of ordinary Japanese and aims to provide a foundation for an explicit semantics of Japanese. The typological or transformational studies will be presented first as data and the corresponding Montague grammatical analyses will be proposed. In Chapter 1, Montague's theory of grammar is discussed, comparisons being made with Davidsonian truth conditional semantics and Chomskyan transformational grammar. In Chapter 2, subjects, adjectives and adverbs are analysed, in Chapter 3, complementation, in Chapter 4 reflexives, passives, causatives, and in Chapter 5 negation and factive presupposition. The main theoretical concern is the relation between a logical syntax and linguistic syntax. It is hoped that a new linguistic framework will be developed from this study. The other important theoretical concern is the relation between semantics and pragmatics.