Number 1
Graduate Working Papers

Case, A Deeper Matter

Kumiko Takahara
University of Colorado

Published 2019-11-11

Keywords

  • case, syntax, japanese

How to Cite

Takahara, K. (2019). Case, A Deeper Matter. Colorado Research in Linguistics, 1. Retrieved from https://journals.colorado.edu/index.php/cril/article/view/5

Abstract

The case markers wa and ga in Japanese are analyzed in a framework similar to Fillmore's case grammar. I argue on both semantic and syntactic grounds that wa- and ga-noun phrases are transformationally derived from conjoined sentences, the markers wa and ga being morphophonemic variants of the conjunctions ba 'if' and wa 'but'. It is shown that the relationship expressed by wa and ga cannot be determined by the underlying semantic relationships alone.