Nihongo no Sintakusu to Imi, I 'Japanese Syntax and Meaning, I' and Nihongo no Sintakusu to Imi, II 'Japanese Syntax and Meaning, II, by Hideo Teramura

Nihongo no Sintaknau to Iai, I 'Japanese Syntax and Meaning, I' by Hideo Teramura. Tokyo: Kuroshioshuppan, 1982. Pp. 326. ¥2,900. Nihongo no Sintakusu to lai, II 'Japanese Syntax and Meaning, II, by Hideo Teramura. Tokyo: Kuroshioshuppan, 1984. Pp. 365. ¥3,600. Reviewed by: Mieko Ohso, Kansai University of Foreign Studies The books under review are the first two volumes of the expected fourvolume work which will comprehensively describe the basic syntax and syntactic meanings of Japanese sentences when completed. The author's primary aim is to write a reference grammar which will provide students of Japanese with the syntactic rules necessary to understand and produce grammatical Japanese sentences. But various theoretical studies previously done are also introduced by the author as background information for his analyses. The book contains interesting analyses of Japanese, and also contrasts Japanese with other languages, mainly with English. Volume I consists of four chapters. Types of grammatical rules and meanings are discussed in the preliminary chapter to define the scope of the linguistic phenomena dealt with in the book. Next, Chapter I deals with the definition of the most basic categories in syntax, sentence and word, and with syntactic categorization of words. Chapter 2 is concerned with the structure of the proposition. This chapter is subdivided according to types of predicates and nominal complements they take. Chapter 3 deals with the system of voice. The passive, potential, spontaneous, and causative voices are discussed. It also discusses the corresponding pairs of transitive and intransitive verbs as the lexical realization of voice interacting with the syntactic voices given above. Volume II consists of three chapters. Chapter 4 examines various views