This paper explains some properties and restrictions involved in phenomena of topicalization in Japanese. The first section reviews certain properties involved in simplex topical sentences; the second section reveals certain constraints on topicalization involved in complex sentences. Section Three pursues one consequence suggested by those…

It has been generally understood that Japanese has two grammatical tenses, past and non-past. However, there are statements about future events which use the "past tense." Furthermore, for certain verbs, the "past tense" is not confined to describing strictly a past event. This paper seeks to clarify the meaning of tense in Japanese and to show…

This paper considers whether the negative transportation (NT) rule operating in English is operative also in Japanese and whether investigation of the phenomenon in Japanese may provide new insights for English research. The discussion begins with an explanation and examples of the NT rule in English. Japanese cases are then studied, and the…

Rules of lexical derivation can be used to account for certain case-related regularities existing between Japanese non-potential verbs and the potential verbs derived from them. Lexical derivation analysis in comparison with a transformational approach is simpler; it requires less powerful rules and therefore makes a stronger claim; and it…

This discussion considers the process of subject raising, which takes the constituent subject out of the complement clause and makes it a constituent of the matrix clause and the occurrence of this process in Japanese and in other subject-object-verb (SOV) languages. The first part of the paper demonstrates why subject raising is not a common…

The designation of the Japanese word class "joshi" (in English known as particles, post-positional case markers, or relationals) by the term te-ni-wo-ha can be traced to the early superimposition of the Chinese writing system on Japanese speech. Because of the structural differences between the two languages and the existence of elements in…