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Paper short abstract:

Quite contrary to the frequently mentioned agglutinating features of Japanese, with relatively easy division of a word into its lexical stem and grammatical content, some morphological phenomena still happen to be misdefined. The omission of nominal modifiers (case drop) is undoubtedly one of them.

Paper long abstract:

Agglutinating features prevail in Japanese. Especially in nominal word units, it does note require elaborate methodology to divide a word into its lexical stem and grammatical content. It is also relatively easy to describe and systematize regular markers of Japanese nominal elements, both in written and in spoken texts and co-texts.

There may be doubts whether nominal phenomena of Japanese shoud be described in terms of declensional paradigm and recognized on the basis of regular morphological patterns (cases). Still, the task of description of a language in terms of regular morphological phenomena is probably not going to be facilitated by recognition of nominal modifiers as optional of virtually non-existent postpositions.

My presentation subject is inspired by a secondary though meaningful remark made by Professor Bjarke Frellevig (2010: 410-411), who states it overtly that: "obligatory marking of all core arguments (subjects and objects) by case particles in written Japanese today is a written language feature [...] It was not a feature of written Japanese before the genbun 'itchi reforms, nor was it ever, or is today, a feature of spoken Japanese, where omission of case particles (case drop) has always been frequent." Apart from unjustified overestimation of the phenomenon of case drop in contemporary Japanese, this remark also seems to severely underestimate the role of nominal element regular marking in classical Japanese.

Japanese nouns, as traditionally neglected parts of speech, do not seem to draw attention of Japanese grammarians, being usually described as non-inflected by the very definition of the taigen supercategory to which they belong. At the same time, neither the communication without nouns, nor with total drop of nominal modifiers seems possible. Also the phenomenon of case drop may and should be described as a systematic feature of Japanese. Some remarks on such approach are going to be presented.