1. Two main themes connect the papers on Japanese syntax collected in
this volume: movements of noun phrases and case marking, although each
in turn relates to other issues in syntax and semantics. These two
themes can be traced back to my 1965 MIT dissertation. The problem of
the so-called topic marker wa is a perennial problem in Japanese
linguistics. I devoted Chapter 2 of my dissertation to the problem of
wa. My primary concern there was transformational genera- tive syntax. I
was interested in the light that Chomsky'S new theory could shed on the
understanding of Japanese sentence structure. I generalized the problem
of deriving wa-phrases to the problem of deriving phrases accompanied by
the quantifier-like particles mo, demo, sae as well as wa. These
particles, mo, demo and sae may roughly be equated with a/so, or
something like it and even, respectively, and are grouped together with
wa under the name of huku-zyosi as a subcategory of particles in
Kokugogaku, Japanese scholarship on Japanese grammar. This taxonomy
itself is a straightforward consequence of distributional analysis, and
does not require the mechanisms of transformational grammar. My
transformational analysis of wa, and by extension, that of the other
huku- zyosi, consisted in formally relating the function of the
post-nominal use of wa to that of the post-predicative use by means of
what I called an attachment transformation.