Practical and Theoretical Studies of Adverbials in English and Japanese

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the first year of this research project, we first carefully examined the observations and analyses of the relevant papers which were published previously. Next applying the analysis of adverbials by Faraci(1974) to Japanese adverbials and focusing on the similarities of adverbial clauses in English and Japanese denoting "reason," "purpose," and "manner," we investigated the syntactic, semantic, and functional properties of the adverbial clauses in question. As the result of this investigation, we found out some sort of structural hierarchy of the Japanese adverbial clauses, the same structural hierarchy of the English equivalents.In the next and last year of this research project, we considered the similarities of adverbial clauses in English and Japanese more carefully, extending our objects of study to "adnominal" clauses, namely relative clauses modifying nominal expressions, and having theoretical points of view in mind. The first conclusion we arrived at was that the same structural hierarchy of the relevant adverbial clauses in English and Japanese can be observed in some relative clauses modifying nominal expressions, that is, the structural hierarchy is a property of adjuncts have in common. And our second conclusion was that the adverbial clauses denoting "reason" share some semantic and functional properties with some relative clauses modifying nominal expressions, in other words, these are properties of adjuncts.