Article: The discourse function of the Japanese dative subject construction in written text.

ABSTRACT. This paper considers the discourse function of dative case marking on subjects in written Japanese texts (novels and newspaper articles) by examining transitivity components in discourse (Hopper and Thompson 1980). It has been shown that three parameters for the dative subject construction--participant type, the topicality nature of dative-marked phrases, and the predicate types including certain types of adjectives and nominals--do not exist arbitrarily at the sentence level, but rather co-exist within the discourse notion of backgrounding. This article shows that the Japanese dative case on subjects is best understood as a perspective marker. *

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