Elements of Grammar: An Analysis of the Core Components of the Lexicogrammar of Japanese

要旨

The purpose of this paper is to provide the methods and concepts employed in the description of the lexicogrammar of Japanese.The approach to be taken for this investigation is an exploratory one, which is presented through an analysis of so-called 'clause-final expressions' (CFEs) in Japanese.The proposal made in this analysis is to be incorporated into a fuller description of a Japanese grammar from a Systemic Functional perspective -an SFG for Japanese (or JSFG for short) -that draws on the Cardiff Grammar approach for its theoretical concepts.However, the concept CFE is a cover term for various items that typically occur after the Main Predicate (which realizes a Process), and it has no place in an explicit grammar of Japanese.CFEs express a range of categories, including what I shall refer to, borrowing Fawcett' terms, as 'validity', 'control' and others.Such items are often seen as equivalent to Auxiliaries in English.Yet it is not possible, as Takubo 2009 shows, to specify criteria (morphological, syntactic or semantic) that will identify them as a class.Here I argue that we should (i) reject the assumption that particular forms belong to particular classes and (ii) use the SFG concept of 'realization rules' to specify which items will expound which elements in which units at which layer of structure, and the conditions under which they do so.I will illustrate the first proposal from the case where the same form may function as either a Main Predicate or an Auxiliary, and the second from realization rules for the expression of 'validity' and 'control' meanings, where two elements (i.e. an Auxiliary and its Extension) realize a single semantic feature in the 'validity' network.This structure shows interesting similarities to the functional structure of the so-called 'phrasal modals' such as "be able to" in the Cardiff Grammar.

主題