The main purpose of this study is to determine the function of no and its place in Japanese Grammar in order to resolve heretofore unsolved problems concerning no. Initiated with this purpose, this dissertation presents an analysis of Words in Japanese with the idea of linguistic analysis based on functors and arguments within the framework largely drawn from Steele (1986), (1987), and (1988). For the formation of Words, we propose a set of rules which is defined in terms of a set of syntactic features which diverges considerably from previous works. Features in our work are not associated with such terms as N or V, but with finite closed-class elements such as particles and tense, from which features it is possible to predict the semantic generalization. Further, it is demonstrated that finite closed-class elements have an important syntactic function associated with them. Case particles are now considered as occupying a position which prenominal determiners have been taking, in the sense that they are a necessary element in an NP. However, they are not considered as a Word, but as part of the morphology of a Word, like other particles. This involves the idea that a Word is determined purely on phonological grounds as a pitch unit. On the base of these fundamental assumptions, our new approach to no enables us to account for every occurrence of no simply and elegantly.

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.

Over the years, phonologists working in the generative framework have encountered a number of persistent problems in their descriptions of Japanese phonology. Several of these problems concern phonological rules that sometimes do and sometimes do not apply in seemingly identical phonological environments. Many of the proposed analyses achieve observational adequacy, but, nonetheless, are intuitively dissatisfying. The first of two such problems involves the desiderative suffix -ta and the homophonous perfective inflection -ta, both of which attach to verb roots. When the verb root is vowel-final, the derivations are straightforward. (1) (a) tabe + ta + i → tabe-ta-i 'want to eat' mi + ta + i → mi-ta-i 'want to see' (b) tabe + ta → tabe-ta 'ate' mi + ta → mi-ta 'see (past)' Derivations are not so straightforward when the verb root is consonant-final. In such cases an intervening i is inserted between the root and the desiderative suffix, but not between the root and the perfective inflection. (2) (a) tat + ta + i → tat-i-ta-i 'want to stand' kat + ta + i → kat-i-ta-i 'want to win' (b) tat + ta → tat-ta 'stood' kat + ta → kat-ta 'won' McCawley (1968) is not specific in how he accounts for this differential it appears that he favours the adoption of a morphological rule such as (3) (from Koo, 1974). (3) ∅ → i / C]v__+tai Koo (1974) has attempted to reanalyze the desiderative suffix as -ita, but, since there is no evidence of W cluster simplification in the language, he is left with the even more difficult problem of deleting the initial i of the suffix following vowel-final verb roots. (4) tabe + ita + i → tabe-ta-i 'want to eat' mi + ita + i → mi-ta-i 'want to see' Maeda (1979) has chosen a boundary solution, positing that t-initial inflections are joined to verb roots by morpheme boundaries (+), while other suffixes such as the desiderative suffix are joined by a stronger boundary (:). By making the i insertion rule sensitive to boundaries of level :, the correct outputs can be derived. This solution, though, is unsatisfactory since the assignment of boundaries is not independently motivated. A second difficulty encountered by McCawley (1968) and others involves a high vowel syncopation rule that deletes the final i or u of Sino-Japanese monomorphemes when the initial consonant of a following Sino-Japanese monomorpheme is voiceless. (5) iti + too → it-too 'first class' roku + ka → rok-ka 'sixth lesson' However, a morpheme- or word-final high vowel at the boundary between a Sino-Japanese compound and a Sino-Japanese monomorpheme does not delete under those conditions insertion of i in these phonological identical environments, but (6) zi-ryoku 'magnetism' (X-Y) zi-ryoku + kei → zi-ryoku-kei 'magnetometer' (X-Y-Z) hai-tatu 'delivery' (Y-Z) betu + hai-tatu → betu-hai-tatu 'special delivery' (X-Y-Z) McCawley accounts for this pattern by invoking internal boundaries of different strengths: + and #. (7) iti + too roku + ka zi + ryoku # kei betu # hai + tatu He claims, then, that high vowel syncopation is sensitive to boundaries of strength + and is, therefore, blocked from applying to the u of zi + ryoku # kei. His analysis is correct, but his assignment of boundary strengths is rather arbitrary. Analyses such as the two above which appeal to boundary strength hierarchies have often been intuitively dissatisfying because of a lack of independent motivation. The relatively recent theory of lexical morphology and phonology as formulated by Kiparsky (1982) is ideally suited for this type of problem. One of the theory's most compelling attributes is that phonological processes may be put into a much broader context that includes morphological processes as well. This more integrated approach is often able to fit formerly isolated facts into a network of related facts to provide compelling independent motivation for diverse processes. The purpose of this thesis, then, is to fit i insertion, high vowel syncopation, and other Japanese phonological processes into the lexical phonology network to see exactly how they are related to each other and to the morphological phenomena of the language. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate

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