A THEORETICAL APPROACH TO THE JAPANESE VERBAL SYSTEM WITH COMPUTATIONAL IMPLICATIONS (CASE FRAME, PHRASE STRUCTURE, LEXICON, CASE ASSIGNMENT)

This study presents a set of phrase structure rules for Japanese and an analysis of the verbal component, both of which are intended to serve a unified treatment of case assignment. Analyses presented here are expressed in X-bar schema as well as in the formalism of Lexical Functional Grammar.;This study also postulates a new syntactic category U(se), which stands for not only 'function words' but inflections. The postulation of this category permits the claim that Japanese phrase structure consists of the complement and the head at all levels, thus making it possible for the set of phrase structure rules to be compact.;Comparison is made between the present model of grammar with other hypotheses: the flat structure hypothesis, the move-alpha hypothesis and case-linking grammar. It is also shown that the present model facilitates an attempt at an overall treatment of the causative construction which has been problematic to other analyses.;In addition, a case theory is presented which is an extension of the work by localist case theorists. Unlike those of case theorists, however, the aspect system supporting the proposed case theory is an extension of the work by Vendler. Based on this theory, lexical entries for verbs are postulated and designed so that they, together with the proposed phrase structure rules and lexical entries for elements in the category U, make possible a unified treatment of case assignment.;The set of phrase structure rules is formulated on the following hypotheses: (a) Japanese phrase strucure is strictly binary-branching and head-final, (b) the surface linear order of constituents is base-generated, (c) grammatical relations in Japanese are not defined configurationally, but mainly through cases, (d) Japanese differentiates between logical and constituent sentences. Logical sentences presuppose the presence of a subject, whereas constituent sentences do not. Finally, (e) the minimal elements necessary to compose a Japanese constituent sentence are a verb, a tense marker and an element indicating the use of the sentence, whereas the minimal elements for a logical sentence are a verb and a subject.