Universal Rule of Infinite Variety?
Universal Rule of Infinite Variety?

Japanese Nominal Elements as Abandoned Parts of Speech

Author(s): Arkadiusz Jabłoński
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Other Language Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Japanese language; nominal elements; word form; agglutinative properties; morphology; paradigmatic features
Summary/Abstract: It is common in the grammatical descriptions of Japanese to neglect the morphological properties of the nominal elements of the language. This may probably be related to the Sino-centric tradition of ideographic (sinographic) writing and results in emphasizing the isolating and analytic properties of the Chinese languages it originates from. In this paper, certain detailed consequences of this approach are presented. They include, in the first place, the lack of differentiation between lexical and grammatical elements in grammatical descriptions. Little interest towards the concept of paradigmatic nominal word units, uneven recognition of agglutinative properties of language in the nominal and verbal elements of Japanese as well as description of peripheral phenomena instead of general rules may be considered the immediate consequences of the status quo. Bizarre or contradictory theories resulting from it, also presented in the paper, embody a characteristic preference for unsystemic grammatical description among the grammarians of Japanese, described in terms of emphasizing alleged infinite variety over universal morphological rules.

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