Syntactic categories in Japanese: A typological and cognitive introduction.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the organization of syntactic categories in Japanese and provides a typologically valid basis for cognitive linguistic analyses of the language. Three fundamental problems in syntactic category analyses of Japanese in the past are identified in Chapter 1. The chapter then briefly outlines recent discoveries on the nature of category in cognitive linguistics; specifically prototype semantic theory (Lakoff 1987, Taylor 1990), discusses central notions of Cognitive Grammar developed by Langacker (1987, 1991), and summarizes Croft's (1991) theory for the universal definition of major syntactic categories. Chap. 2 examines structural criteria used in previous analyses for identification of the five so-called major categories in Japanese, clarifies points of disagreement, re-evaluates each criterion in light of Croft's model, and argues that the crucial notion characterizing the structural aspects of the categories in Japanese is a language-specific property of morphological boundness. This boundness criterion not only serves as a basis for the definition of inflection in Japanese, but divides syntactic categories in Japanese into two major classes, each of which is unmarked, or designed for one of the two primary pragmatic functions of predication and reference. Two unique categories of Japanese, Nominal Adjectives and Verbal Nouns are examined in Chap. 3 and 4 respectively, and cognitive semantic analyses of the two problematic categories are presented. Specifically, it is argued that the grammatical behavior that the two categories exhibit is well motivated by their meaning--meaning as conceptualization. Evidence is provided for the fundamental assumptions necessarily underlying syntactic category analyses of the language: prototype organization, the syntax-lexicon continuum, and the conceptualization process. Chap. 5 examines a functional motivation of the cardinal structural feature of boundness in Japanese, presents the results of a lexical semantic survey, and argues that the boundness distinction is well motivated by the semantic distinction of relationality, although this correlation has been obscured to some extent in contemporary Japanese. A diachronic account for the form/meaning mismatch is offered in which a semantic shift that occurred to Nouns, which led to the birth of Nominal Adjectives, was not fully accompanied by the shift in morphological boundness.