| This thesis is a study of the inflection appearing on adjectives in Japanese. The goal of this work is to investigate the structure of adjectival constructions in Japanese and its relation to adjectival inflection.;Chapter 1 reviews the general patterns of inflection appearing on attributive adjectives in world languages. Comparative study suggests that inflection on adjectives in their noun-modifying function typically falls into one of the following categories: (i) agreement, (ii) case-marking, (iii) definiteness marking, (iv) incorporated/reduced relative clause material, (v) long- and short-form morphology, and (vi) adverbial marking. A simple question is: which category does Japanese adjectival morphology belong to? Chapter 2 introduces data of adjectival forms in Japanese, with special attention to inflection. Japanese is unique in that it contains two morphologically distinct types of adjectives, which I call True Adjective and Nominal Adjective. I discuss the two types from morphological, syntactic and semantic perspectives, and review the main literature on the topic. Chapter 3 examines the nature of the attributive adjective inflection in Japanese, taking up the possibilities sketched out in chapter 1. Traditionally, linguists have assumed that Japanese attributive adjective inflection represents incorporated/reduced relative clause material ((iv) above). However, I show this idea is not sufficient to analyze all prenominal adjectives in Japanese with evidence from semantics and distributional patterns in Japanese dialects. Chapter 4 further explores the nature of the inflection on attributive adjectives in Japanese. I argue that the historical development of Japanese adjectival inflection, as well as the status of Japanese as a case-marking language, makes the case-marking analysis ((ii) above) plausible. I then discuss the remarkable similarity between Japanese adjectival inflection and the so-called Ezafe marking on adjectives and other nominal modifiers observed in Indo-Iranian languages. In the remainder of the chapter, I extend the case marking analysis of prenominal inflection to the other adjectival constructions in Japanese, including predicatives, adverbials, small clauses, and secondary predicatives. Finally, Chapter 5 constitutes a technical argument for the case-marking hypothesis, involving ellipsis with a small set of Japanese adjectives of space and time. |
