L’interpretazione della categoria del “caso grammaticale” in Giappone

This paper aims to analyze the introduction of the “grammatical case” category in the Japanese grammatical tradition. This concept, first encountered within the Buddhist Canon, has been borrowed from Dutch and English grammar textbooks and applied to the Japanese language. The Japanese grammarians however defined the concept of case on a purely functional basis and linked it to the pragmatic level and to categories such as topic and comment. The final step is a conscious reinterpretation of the case category by Yamada and Tokieda, who describe case as the relation that concept words have with each other. Therefore, case is applied not only to nouns, but also predicates, conjunctions and even rhetorical devices: each and every concept word has its own case, allowing those scholars to distance themselves from the traditional definition of case.