"This research aims at describing and explaining Japanese relative clause syntactically and semantically in scientific and literary style. The relative clauses are analyzed based on sentence context. Therefore, we can have a comprehensive description of structure and type of relative clauses. The corpus of this research derives from the text books and a novel. The text books used are Nihon Shakai Saiko: Japanese an Update, written by Mizue Sasaki and Masarni Kadokura in 1991 and Nihon Jija Shiriizu: Nihonjin no Issho written by Shuichi Saito in 1980. The novel entitled Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto written in 1991 is also used in this research. The writer uses recording technique in collecting data which are then analyzed based on embedding technique. Data analysis is classified into two groups: (1) the structure of relative clause and (2) the type of relative clauses. The structure of relative clause consists of patterns of relative clause, noun phrase as a head, and relative markers. The types of relative clause consist of type of relative clauses based on the presence/absence of "case relation" and the types of relative clause based on their functions.
Analysis result indicates that relative clause patterns consist of five patterns. Namely (1) NPI wa/ga + NP2 + Copula, (2) NP wa/ga + AP, (3) NP wa/ga + VP, (4) NPI wa/ga + NP2 o + VP, and (5) NPI wa + NP2 ga + VP. Noun phrases which can be modified by relative clauses are NP functioning as subject, object, complement, adverb, and predicate in the matrix clause. Then, relative markers which indicate the relation between relative clauses and noun phrases can be grouped into (I) zero relative marker, (2) to iu relative marker, and (3) optional relative marker. The use of relative markers is determined by semantic feature of noun phrase. Based on analysis we can find two types of relative clauses based on the presence/the absence of case relation", namely, internally headed and externally headed relative clause, whereas the result based on the function is divided into two types: defining and non-defining relative clause."
Depok: Fakultas Ilmu Pengetahuan Budaya Universitas Indonesia, 2001
