Syntactic Functions of Case Indicating Particles in Japanese : K. Inoue's Analysis of Case Indicating Features in Her 'HENKEIBUNPOU TO NIHONGO'

Inoue s analysis of Japanese syntactic structure tries to systemasically theorize the meanings and functions of the Japanese case indicator "kakujoshi" within the frame work of generative transformational theories, mainly based on both Chomsky's "standard theory" and Fillmore's theory of "case grammar". The standard theory considers the case as secondary grammatical notion. Grammatical cases are derived through government relations of NP' s assigned to the base category symbols. Inoue took this idea into her theory and considered Japanese case indicating particles, 'ga', 'ni', 'wo' as Japanese grammatical case indicators. These particles are distinguished from other similar particles only due to the differences of the transformational stages of application. Inoue also took in major principles and methodology of Fillmore's case grammar, and developed a theory of case relations in predicate argument structures under the title of "kaku-soseiron" (case feature theory). The major differences between Fillmore's case grammar and Inoue's case feature theory are (1) Fillmore relates semantic case features expressed in the formula of 'K+NP' to either grammatical cases and periphery cases expressesd in the form of 'preposition+NP' in the surface structure, while Inoue's case features don't have concrete relations to uniquely specified case indicating particles, (2) Fillmore's semantic 'cases' are abstracted from grammatical cases in terms of semantic relations between NP's and their governing predicate, while some of Inoue's 'cases in the base' are settled not only from the NP-predicate relation but from a relation between an NP and the rest of the predicate argument structure. Her theory has provided many interesting inferences about Japanese syntactic structures and semantic featues of case indicating particles through application of the case theories in terms of Generative Transformational Grammar. But, there still remain major questions about the grammatical notion of case and the principle distinguishing grammatical cases and case features. They are supposed to be equally expressed by 'kakujoshis' which have in fact no distinction whichever 'case' they might be expressed for. Another fact that her semantic case features have no adequate expressions in Japanese reflects her attitude toward Japanese 'case' : Japanese 'cases' could be theorized but are defective in some expressions. Her notion of 'case' in Japanese does not seem to bave been inductively theorized from 'case' ralations expressed in Japanese.