Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 1999. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 54 p. : ill. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-53).

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, School of English, Linguistics and Media, Department of Linguistics, 2003. / "May 2002" Bibliography: p. 399-419.

Originally submitted as the author's Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1975. / "February, 1977." Errata sheets inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 150-154).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-47).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation examines how information structure is represented in the different components of Japanese grammar. Each chapter investigates how topic/comment structure and focus/background structure are manifested in a given component of the grammar; that is, in phonology, syntax, and discourse/semantics. In chapter 2,1 investigate the interaction of syntax and prosody. I introduce the End-based analysis proposed by Selkirk &Tateishi (1988, 91) and propose certain revisions in order to accommodate a broader range of empirical facts than has previously been discussed in the literature. I show that presentational focus and contrastive focus are phonologically distinct and that contrastive focus overrides phonological phrasing. I then demonstrate that the system of focus projection proposed for stress languages such as English and German applies to Japanese. I show that focus projection takes place in the syntactic component, prior to mapping into prosodic structure, from the head of the phrase to its sisters (cf. Rochemont 1996) In chapter 3, I establish the discourse function of wa-marking in Japanese, extending Buring's analysis of sentence topics. I demonstrate that the discourse function of wa-marking parallels that of the L H * contour (B-accent) in English, and claim that wa-marking is equivalent to T-marking in the model of Biiring (1998). As such, wa-marking can be viewed as one of the discourse strategies available in Japanese for ensuring that a given assertion is congruent - that is, appropriate - to the question under discussion. In chapter 4,1 investigate the representation of information structure in syntax. I propose a phrase structure for Japanese based on a universal hierarchy of functional categories. I then divide the syntactic structure of Japanese into two major syntactic domains, which I call the topic domain and the comment domain. I show that both sentence topics and contrastively focused constituents must not be inside IP, which is identified as the comment domain. I further argue that subjects outside IP must be wa-marked unless contrastively focused. I conclude that syntactic structure is discourse-configurationally based. To conclude, I discuss the architecture of the grammar that emerges from the proposal defended in each chapter of this dissertation. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

This thesis investigates the consequences of historical changes of Japanese case particles, 'accusative' o and 'dative' ni. The change of o is characterized as becoming a structural Case-marker from the inherent Case-marker. The consequences of this change are manifested in; (a) the ni filling the gap of linking to the FROM-function vacated by the particle o, becoming the structural accusative Case-marker; (b) the development of the o causative construction; (c) the inability of topicalizing the o-marked object; (d) the disappearance of the sequence of NP-o-to in the coordinate structure; (e) the development of the double o constraint. The constancy of ni throughout the history of the Japanese language is characterized by its lexical content; the Locative ni has not changed. The development of the ni causative is, then, attributed to the development of the nominative marking triggered by the accusative marking, that is, from the ergative case to the nominative case. This ergative hypothesis of Old Japanese is supported by the distribution of the o-marked and non-overtly marked objects which is determined by the transitivity features proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980).

At the stage in the development of generative -transformational grammar when the primary emphasis of research was on the syntactic analysis of sentences, morphology was largely ignored, and the lexicon was simply viewed as an unstructured list of lexical items. However, Chomsky's Lexicalist Hypothesis brought about a renewed interest in word formation, and it is now clear that "the lexicon has a rich, internal structure. In this thesis we will apply the Lexicalist Hypothesis to Japanese, a non -Indo- European, agglutinative language. The analysis presented will be referred to as the "lexical analysis." Two major theoretical issues face the lexical analysis of Japanese. First, it attempts to provide an alternative framework to the transformational analysis that has dominated Japanese linguistics for the past fifteen years. With emphasis on sentences instead of words, the transformational analysis, in a sense, "deagglutinizes" morphologically complex verbs made up of a verb stem and one or more bound morphemes, e.g., V-sase-rare-ta-gat-ta 'V-cause-passive-want-appear- past'. A complex underlying structure is postulated for a sentence with such a verb, with each of the morphemes acting as "higher" verbs in the structure. In the transformational analysis, the fact that the morphemes combine to form a word seems almost incidental. The lexical analysis starts with the assumption that a complex verb comprises a single word that is formed in the lexicon. This forces us to look at Japanese in a different light, as a language with fairly simple phrase structure, and virtually no transformations (if any), but with a rich, highly structured lexicon. This view is closer to the original intuition that Japanese is an agglutinative language. The second theoretical issue concerns the theory of the lexicon. The Lexicalist Hypothesis has been worked out mainly for English, a nonagglutinative language. Since a primary concern of the Hypothesis is with words, it makes sense to test it using a language such as Japanese that has rich and varied word formation processes. The lexical analysis of Japanese draws from major works on the lexicon in English, but because of the highly agglutinating nature of Japanese, we find it necessary to reject, alter, and extend various aspects of lexical analysis of English. The goal of the lexical analysis is to define organizations within the Japanese lexicon. Two types of organizations the lexical analysis focuses on are (a) content and ordering of rules that apply within the domain of the lexicon, and (b) arrangement of verbs, both simple (i.e., verb stem) and complex, listed in the lexicon. Regarding (a), word formation rules akin to those proposed by Aronoff bear the responsibility of forming complex verbs in Japanese; and "redundancy rules" assign rule- governed, i.e., "regular," case arrays to the NPs in the subcategorization feature of verbs. Idiosyncratic case marking is either attributed to a particular lexical item -- verb -specific case marking --or assigned by a rule with a limited scope (Marked-Case Specification Rule). As for (b), the lexicon imposes an organization on all listed verbs by providing slots within "paradigmatic structures." Verb stems automatically receive a slot, and thus they are the most basic verbs, while complex verbs formed by word formation rules can only enter an appropriate slot if the slot is not already occupied by a more basic lexical item, usually a verb stem. If a complex verb can occupy a slot, it receives a lexical entry and becomes part of the permanent lexicon. These verbs undergo lexical processes such as semantic drift and nominalization commonly attributed to the basic verb stems. It is hoped that the lexical analysis of Japanese presented in this thesis will be a model for other agglutinative languages. As a way of illustrating this possibility, Turkish, Mitla Zapotec, and Navajo are briéfly considered in light of the lexical analysis of Japanese. While all of these languages share virtually the same components within the lexicon, a slight difference in the arrangement of the components leads to the difference in the morphological characterization among the languages.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 297-313).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-165). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.