The Analysis of Japanese Relative Clauses A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION ENGINEERING OF THE TOKYO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ENGINEERING

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Prof. Hozumi Tanaka in supervising me over the past two years, giving me the opportunity to come to Japan, and making every step of the journey to reach this point smooth and enjoyable. At the same time, Assoc. Prof. Takenobu Tokunaga has generously given of his time to help me take my first shakey steps towards becoming a genuine researcher. Thanks go also to the long-suffering residents of Room 807 and all other members of the Tanaka and Tokunaga laboratories, in being asked for opinions on reams of example sentences, getting me and my computer back on speaking terms on numerous occassions, and for doing it all with a genuine smile all the way. I doubt that this research would have progressed anywhere near the stage it has, without the assistance of the NTT Machine Translation group in providing access to their unsurpassed range of resources. In particular, I cannot thank Francis Bond enough for patiently reading papers in varying stages, sharing his work, and generally being a good friend throughout the past two years. I look forward to getting back to my definiteness 'roots' with Francis now that I have this little fellow out of the way! And most importantly, I would like to thank family and friends for being patient and understanding while I learnt how to do things the hard way. I would like to say that I will devote more of myself, my time, and my energy to being a better husband, brother, son, and friend from now on, but realistically know that I am only going to turn around and plunge myself back into the cesspool of relative clauses and put you all through more of the same! vii Abbreviations abl Ablative acc Accusative all Allative cause Causative com Comitative dat Dative dim Familial Diminutive gen Genitive loc Locative mutual Mutual neg Negative-nml Nominaliser nom Nominative pass Passive past Past tense pres Non-past tense prog Progressive qp Question Particle quot Quotative ren Ren'yo top Topic while While (nagara) viii Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Objectives and outline 1.1.1 Statement of purpose of this research The purpose of this research is to classify Japanese relative clauses according to the nature of the semantic relationship between the relative clause body and the noun head. We consider the relative clause construal process as being both syntactically …