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Previous research on “possibility expressions” of Japanese and Chinese have been made by contrast analysis ,of words such as “..kotogadekiru” and “..reru” in Japanese, and in “nen”, “hoe”, “koei” in Chinese.
However, looking at the past examples, there are many cases which cannot be properly categorized. Hence the language has to be studied from its morphology.
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the Japanese and Chinese possibility expressions, based on “non-category theory”. Looking from the point of view of the “non-category theory”, the properties of the “isolating language” (Chinese) have been ignored, or have been forcibly categorized based on the other language (inflectional language), and this would have given misleading results. Hence this research is made from the fundamental characteristics of the Chinese language.
In cases of formal languages such as English and other Greco-Latin based languages, and agglutinating languages such as Japanese, the properties of the individual word is not lost or altered by amalgamating other words together. Hence, in such languages permanency and consistency exists. However, in the case of Chinese, the concept of a word can vary a lot and is unstable. It is not uncommon that one word could hold several meanings. Hence it is very difficult to grasp the meaning of each individual word if it is isolated. Therefore it can be said that there is no structure in the Chinese grammar.
Looking into previous comparison analysis between Japanese and Chinese, it has become clear that most researchers did not separate between meaning and structure. Hence, when comparing Chinese with other languages, meaning and structure have to be properly differentiated.
The meaning of words in Chinese is not established under a given structural rule, but more under mutual understanding, due to the large influence from its background. Examples of comparison analysis made in this thesis are all based on the non-category theory.
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