As we can do for many other languages in the world, we can distin guish three types of subordinate clauses (SCs) in Japanese: those which modify noun phrases, those which modify verb phrases or whole clauses,
and those which function as noun phrases themselves. They are commonly called relative clauses, adverbial clauses and complements respective ly. Examples of each type of SC in Japanese may be given as below:
(5) Metsuboo ni mukatteiru jinrui extinction toward is heading human race
'The human race which is heading for extinction'
(6) Jinrui ga metsuboo— shita a t o , nani ga chikyuu o shihai-suru human race NOM extinguished after what NOM earth ACC conquer
3 What this sentence means is that my study here is not going to be comprehensive with regards to GA and WA in every possible occurrence of SC. For instance a whole SC may be topicalised or occur in some syntactic environment which could affect the GA and WA markings within the clause. I do not intend to cover every instance of SC in such cases but to differentiate SCs by their types in this study.
daroo. I wonder
'After the human race is extingushed, I wonder what will conquer earth.'
(7) Ookuno hito ga jinrui ga metsuboo-suru to shinjiteiru. many people NOM human race NOM extinguish COM believe
'Many people believe that the human race will be extinguished.'
Adverbial clauses and complements have subordinating morphemes (SMs) at the end of the clause. For (6), the SM is ato and for (7), to. Some adverbial clauses such as conditionals may be indicated by a verb inflection. For instance (6) could be made into a conditional clause by changing the verb metsuboo-suru'to extinguish' to its conditional
form metsuboo-shitara:
(8) Jinrui ga metsuboo-shitara... 'If the human race is extinguished...'
SCs marked by a verb form however, are limited in Japanese: they are restricted only to conditionals.
In addition to the three SC types that may affect the occurrence of NP GA and NP WA within the clause, also important is the kind of SM by which the clause is marked. This is so, one suspects, because many SMs in Japanese are derived from nouns and as such, a number of them still retain lexical meaning and certain characteristics of nouns. These noun— like SMs are recognised by Japanese traditional grammarians who refer to these as keishiki-meishi'empty nouns'. According to Teramura (1980), in modern day Japanese empty nouns have come to assume one of the following functions: firstly as conjunctions (in Teramura's sense of the word, which is equivalent to our adverbial SMs); secondly as nominalisers or complementisers; and thirdly as modality particles. It may be possible that adverbial clauses or complements which are marked by empty nouns behave differently with regard to GA and WA markings from those which are marked by SMs with no lexical content. The
possibility cannot be dismissed at this stage since such SCs with empty nouns functioning as subordinate markers are structurally the same as relative clauses in Japanese and if there is any difference found in the distribution of WA and GA amongst SCs, one must know whether or not the distinctions exist at all according to the nature of subordinating morphemes.
Thus I propose the following classification of SC types in Japanese:
I RELATIVE CLAUSE (RC) 1 Internal RC
2 External RC 3 To-iu RC
II SC MARKED BY SM WITH NOMINALITY 1 Adverbial C
2 Complement C
III SC MARKED BY SM WITH LITTLE OR NO NOMINALITY 1 Adverbial C
2 Complement C
The internal and external RCs above must not be confused with the internal and external RCs Keenan (1985:143) distinguished. In a normal RC construction the modifying clause lacks a noun phrase and its head noun phrase fits as the NP lacking in the clause. It is usually possible to trace the head NP back into the clause. Following Teramura (ibid.) I refer to such relative clauses as internal since the head noun has the internal relationship with the clause. The head NP of external RCs on the other hand is not traceable into the clause and thus the modifying clause in external RC construction is just like an independent sentence with no missing N P . The relationship of the head NP and the modifying clause is like that of apposition. The modifying
clause explains the content of the head NP. See (9), (10) and (11) below:
(9) Kaji ga hirogatta genin fire NOM spread cause
'The cause of the fire having spread wide' (10) Dareka ga kaidan o agaru oto
someone NOM stairs ACC go up sound 'The sound of someone going up the stairs'
(11) Shichinin no samurai ga noomin o tasukeru eiga seven of NOM farmers ACC help movie 'The movie in which seven samurais help the farmers'
These typical external RCs nicely exemplify that modifying clauses in such RC constructions do not lack an NP and have the syntactic properties of a sentence. These examples also show that the semantic relationship of the head and the modifying clause is that the modifying clause is an elaboration on the content of the head nouns.
Amongst external RCs there are those which require the morpheme to- iu to be placed between the head NP and the modifying clause. To— iu may be analysed as the complementiser to and the verb iu'to say', but it has ceased to function as the verb and complementiser and has instead become more like one morpheme which is needed only for certain external RCs and is never used for internal R C s . As to the exact definition of external RCs which must obligatorily take to— i u . one has yet to be resolved. It appears that the semantics of the head NPs and of the modifying clauses trigger the usage of to-iu. but the analysis is still far from reaching any conclusive result or generalisation.4 I am not going into further details for to-iu RCs for they do not have direct relevance to the purpose of our study.
4 For more detailed discussion on to— iu R C , readers are referred to Teramura (1980:106— 19).
For adverbial clauses of II-l and III-l above, I propose to further subcategorise them according to their semantics as: time clause, reason clause, condition clause, degree clause and manner clause. II— 1 does not have condition clauses and III-l likewise lacks manner clauses.