Grammatical relations and case marking

Abstract

A clause is a linguistic unit which consists, at a minimum, of a predicate and its argument(s). It is a unit smaller than a sentence, for a sentence can consist of more than one clause. In Japanese, a predicate is a verb (verbalpredicate), an i- or na-adjective plus copula (adjectivalpredicate), or a noun plus copula (nominalpredicate). Arguments typically, but not necessarily, consist of nounphrases (NPs) such as mado ga, heya ga, kore ga in (1).