Case , Word Order , Grammatical Function and Information Structure in Japanese

2 Acknowledgements I thank my professors and mentors Ralf Vogel and Miriam Butt. Ralf Vogel provided me constantly with support and encouragement. I benefited a lot from the discussions with him. He was the person who evoked my interest in syntax and OT and impressed me with his prompt and insightful analysis of linguistic data. Furthermore, I thank Miriam Butt for her professional comments and advice. I feel very lucky to have met Miriam Butt at the computational linguistics fall school at the University of Konstanz. She is such an inspiring teacher that I decided to write my masters thesis in the framework of LFG. Many thanks go to my friends and fellow students at the University of Bielefeld for many good discussions. A special thank goes to Attila Sepsi and Ioan Ghisoiu for cheering me up during my master course. I am deeply grateful to my mother and Japanese informant Nobuko Sugisaki for being patient to be tested over a dozen of Japanese sentences. My wholehearted thanks go to my husband Andreas Bleiker for being supportive and understanding during my study in Bielefeld. I would not have finished my study in two years without his support and pragmatic suggestions. 3 List of Abbreviations ACC accusative case LOC locative case ADJ adjunct NEG negative AG agent NOM nominative case ASP aspect NZER nominalizer BCK background OBJ object COM comitative case OBJ θ semantically restricted object COMP complement OBL oblique CONTRA contrastiveness OBL θ semantically restricted oblique COP copula OSV object-subject-verb DAT dative case PAST past tense DF discourse function PAT patient EMP emphasis PRED predicate FOC focus PRES present tense GEN genitive case Q question word GER gerund SOV subject-object-verb GF grammatical function SUBJ subject HON honorific TOP topic I.OBJ indirect object VOL volitional INSTR instrumental case VP verbal phrase K kase(case) XADJ open adjunct KP kase (case) phrase XCOMP open complement Index Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations