Toward the Identification of Japanese Particles: The case of Ni

要旨

0. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to present a unified functional analysis of ni, one of the adpositional particles in Japanese. By examining its diverse manifestations in discourse, we will see that its apparently inconsistent and mysterious behavior cannot be easily accommodated in any of the generally accepted notion of case in current linguistic theories. Rather, it is the kind of marker that requires a special case status all to itself. Our conclusion is that the function of ni is inherently of semantic nature and that it unanimously serves to mark a specific point in the universe, in direct relationship to which an action or process takes place.

主題