Abstract

Recent grammatical theories on the nominal phenomenareveal a preference for the description of semanticsand syntax. Morphology is not regarded as a relevantlevel of approach to the systemic features of alanguage.

The semantic and syntactic explanation may be effectivein isolating and positional languages, with analyticword constructions. They reveal certainshortcomings, however, when applied to thedescription of agglutinative languages, with stems(lexical morphemes) employing unifunctionalauxiliary elements (grammatical morphemes) to formsynthetic word forms. A morphological approach tothe Japanese nominal elements, proposed also as apart of the grant OPUS 10 obtained from the PolishNational Science Center in 2016, is presented in thepaper. Keywords: Japanese, nouns, morphology, case,declension

Essential facts

Japanese is usually described as a predominantlyagglutinative language. The fact that its nominalunits (nouns, pronouns and numerals) revealmorphological grammatical marking remains, so far,without systemic explanation. The basic unresolvedissue is whether a nominal unit, such as watashi 私・わたし ‘I,’ connectsits grammatical markers in an analytical manner, aswatashi ga (1a.) orsynthetically, as a one-word unit watashiga (1b. – rendered aswatashi-ga only inorder to separate its synthetic constituents inglossing). The difference between the recognition ofthe allegedly syntactic collocation watashi ga or the regularsynthetic nominal word unit watashiga, both containing the non-topic(despite various explanations presented by manyexisting sources) marker ga or -ga(depending on its analytic or synthetic description)is also not marked in the original Japanesescript.

The analytic, semantics- or syntax-based approachdominates in the grammatical sources on Japanese(the descriptions belonging to the current Japaneseschool grammar as well as numerous foreignpublications relying on the analytic methodology andfocused on the semantic-related or fragmentaryapproach to the Japanese declension have beenomitted in this short paper). At the same time,there are systemic grounds to support the synthetic,morphological view of the nominal phenomena.