This volume presents a comprehensive, theoretically explicit reference grammar of Japanese syntax within the Minimalist Program, organised throughout around a single functional sequence (CP > TP > AspP > NegP > vP > VP) whose motivation and internal elaboration recur across all twenty-four chapters. The head-final parameter serves as the central organising concept, determining the canonical SOV order, the postpositional phrase structure, the prenominal modification patterns, and the suffix ordering in the verbal complex that provides the most transparent evidence for the Mirror Principle in any major world language. Coverage extends from phrase structure and case marking through predicate morphology (voice, negation, tense-aspect-modality-evidentiality), clause structure and subordination, clause combining, and information structure. A dedicated chapter on the morphology-syntax interface establishes the systematic mapping from the traditional six conjugation bases (katsuyōkei) to Minimalist functional heads, demonstrating how agglutinative morphology directly reflects syntactic hierarchy. The volume also integrates dialectal syntax spotlights, highlighting Kansai and Kyushu variations that illuminate the parametric nature of syntactic phenomena, particularly in negation, relative clauses, and the binding of the reflexive zibun. Open controversies in the primary literature — the status of scrambling, the structural versus inherent case debate, competing analyses of honorific agreement — are presented as live empirical debates rather than resolved by fiat. Every chapter closes with a comparative note systematically contrasting Japanese against Bangla, an unrelated SOV language chosen precisely because it shares Japanese's basic word-order typology without its genetic affiliation, isolating which properties of Japanese syntax follow from the head-final parameter itself. The volume is addressed to syntacticians, typologists, and advanced students seeking a single, cross-referenced point of entry into the generative literature on Japanese, combining reference-grammar coverage with sustained theoretical argument.
