Stratificational Distribution of the Case-Indicating Particles in the Japanese Language

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  • ITO Rensuke
    ISHIKAWA AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE, Office of Foreign Language Teaching

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  • 日本語の主格を表示する助詞の階層的分布
  • ニホンゴ ノ シュカク オ ヒョウジスル ジョシ ノ カイソウテキ ブンプ

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Japanese case-indicating particles 'wa', 'ga', 'no' have been classified according to their most prominent syntactic functions in Japanese grammar. In early Japanese, 'wa' and 'wo' had already settled their usages to indicate the thematic subject and the object of the verb respectively, but subject- and object-indications without using 'ga' or 'wo' or any other particles were also found very widely. 'Ga' originally indicated possessive or genitive case of the noun as we still have the remnant of its usage in the title of the national anthem "Kimi-ga-yo", but it has developed a usage as an indicator of the subject of a predicate in a fundamental unit containing the subject and predicate (i.e. sentence introducing the new information or clause imbedded in a superordinate one (See mainly 3-2 of this article)) in the Japanese language. 'No' in modern Japanese, though predominantly used as the indicator of possessive or genitive case, can still indicate the subject, as 'ga' does, in a relativised clause without another imbedded clause. It semantically indicates the subject of a 'head' noun implying action, state or process (i.e. predicate) in a noun phrase containing a series of noun phrases linked by 'no'. (See 4-2 of this article.) Japanese, however, has a more primitive way of putting together bare or simple nouns (which mean nouns without any additinal morphological elements) written in Chinese characters only, combining them into a unit of a long phrase, which is interpreted as a long noun phrase in which a series of nouns are linked by 'no'. (See the example sentences numbered from (69) to (72).) This type of noun phrase gives a sense of package with its individual components implying a certain syntactic function semantically originated or embodied in respective nouns. This observation suggests that, in the Japanese language, the subject is not uniquely indicated by one specific particle, but instead is indicated by three different particles, 'wa', 'ga' and 'no', together with the stratum or level of the clause in which it is included.

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