Paper short abstract:

In "wabun"(the colloquial style in the Heian Period,),later parts of compound verbs frequently took derivative meanings. They often express aspects, feelings, and so on. However, in case of "kirokutai" (Japanized Chinese style) later parts of compound verbs rarely had derivative meanings.

Paper long abstract:

In ancient Japanese, three literary styles existed: "wabun" which was written by words in original Japanese, "kanbunkundokutai" which was used when reading Chinese passages in Japanese , and "kirokutai":Japanized Chinese style which was used for recording diaries and documents. These styles had both the common parts and the different ones, and people in those days were using these styles differently for various situations.

Akira Minegishi pointed out a lot of the compound verbs as the feature of "kirokutai", and reported that these compound verbs are prepared for "kirokutai" in order to express formal businesses and informal events in detail.

In "wabun", the style which was akin to an oral language in the Heian Period, later parts of compound verbs frequently took derivative meanings. They often express aspects, good or bad feelings for that happenings, frequency of the happenings or emphasis of the verbs, and so on. On the other hand, in case of "Mido-kampaku-ki", later parts of compound verbs rarely had derivative meanings.

Taro Kageyama pointed out that compound verbs in Japanese can be classified into Lexical V-V Compound Verbs and syntactic compound verbs and that then Lexical V-V Compound Verbs which had already been developed in Ancient Japanese can be classified into Thematic Compound Verbs and Aspectual Compound Verbs(Kageyama(1993)). According to this suggestion, we can say that  Thematic Compound Verbs were so developed then that only these were seen in "kirokutai", while Aspectual Compound  Compound Verbs were often seen in "wabun".

The possible reasons for this are like that: (1)If they use Chinese characters with derivative meanings, it was more difficult for them to understand that text.(2) To express aspect, the likes and dislikes, frequency of the happenings or emphasis of the verb, "Kirokutai" had various expressions which originated in classical Chinese.

As an important  point, we can point out that subsequent verbs of Aspectual Compound Verbs such as "hatsu（果つ）","wataru(渡る)"　developed in "wabun"  vanished later and  that subsequent verbs such as "oku（置く）","iku（行く）" which often produced Thematic relation compound verbs in "kirokutai" developed as a grammatical form.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper we compare synchronic and historical theories of Japanese tonology, testing both against actual data and examining exceptions and problem cases. We discuss what it means for a historical account to have explanatory power, and how it can help us understand inter-dialectal relationships.

Paper long abstract:

Standard Tōkyō Japanese is a pitch-accent language; that is, it is tonal, with a restriction of at most one tone per word (called 'the accent'). When nouns are compounded together, the position of the accent in the resulting compound is notoriously tricky to predict, seemingly occurring in patterns that depend on the components, but with plenty of exceptions and variation. Many accounts of this phenomenon restrict themselves to synchronic linguistics, trying to discover patterns from the point of view of the ahistorical language system as acquired by the individual native speaker. These accounts make use of data such as recent loans and nonsense words to uncover the underlying accent-marking tendencies, and postulate any exceptions to be lexicalised entries.

In this paper we explore a historical explanation of compound noun accent, based on Middle Japanese tone materials. We compare the descriptive reach of the historical theory with that of synchronic accent rules, by testing both theories against actual data and giving special attention to cases where the data defies the predicted forms. We discuss briefly what it means for a historical theory to have explanatory adequacy, and how that can be relevant for the synchronic goal of understanding the individually acquired system. Finally, we explore the predictive and explanatory power of the historical theory to provide a single explanation encompassing all Japanese dialects, testing it against novel fieldwork data.

The synchronic rules will be based on proposals by Haruo Kubozono, and the historical reconstruction on the model developed by Ramsey/De Boer.

Paper short abstract:

This study clarifies the tense-mood system of Early Middle Japanese, which has 8 tense-mood suffixes. They are classified into the following five groups: [realis, past, assertive] suffixes [-, -, 0] -m-, -zi- [-, +, 0] -mase- [+, -, -] -ram- [+, +, +] -tu-, -se-, -ker- [+, +, -] -kem-

Paper long abstract:

This study clarifies the tense-mood system of Early Middle Japanese (hereafter "EMJ") based on reality, pastness, and assertiveness. This study shows that Japanese had a grammatical distinction between realis and irrealis mood even in subordinate clauses, which is unmarked in later stages of the language.

EMJ has a unique group of the following eight derivational verb suffixes with both temporal and modal meaning (hereafter "TMSes"):

{-m-}, {-zi-}, {-masi-}, {-ram-}, {-tu-}, {-si-}, {-ker-}, {-kem-}

Although TMSes have been studied well, previous studies have only paid attention to their semantics, treating each TMS without evaluating them systematically. TMSes deserve greater attention because they share the same morphological behavior. TMSes are mutually exclusive and always appear at the ends of verb stems.

TMSes are selected on the basis of reality, pastness, and assertiveness. (i) Reality and pastness are judged by the combination of TMSes in the predicates of temporally modifying and modified clauses. Considering the combination, they are classified into the following three groups:

[-realis]: {-m-}, {-zi-}, {-masi-}

[+realis, -past]: {-ram-}

[+realis, +past]: {-tu-}, {-si-}, {-ker-}, {-kem-}

(ii) The semantic feature [-realis] of {-m-}, {-zi-}, and {-masi-} is reflected in the combination of TMSes in the predicates of conditional sentences. If the predicate of a conditional clause takes {-m-}, {-zi-}, or {-masi-}, the predicate of the consequent clause also takes one of these suffixes. Otherwise, the predicate of the consequent clause can take any TMS. This combinational restriction is based on the semantic feature [-realis].

(iii) The semantic features [+realis] and [+assertive] of {-tu-} and {-si-} are judged by their co-occurrence with the derivational verb suffixes {-nar-} or {-mer-}, which respectively express auditory or visual evidence. Among TMSes, only {-tu-} and {-si-} can follow these evidential suffixes and hence are characterized with [+realis] and [+assertive]. This is because evidentiality is a grammatical category to express the evidence of the situation in question which was gotten by the point of speech. This meaning does not fit with the semantic features [-realis] and [-assertive] which the other.

Paper short abstract:

This study examines early Heian Japanese renditions of Sinitic Buddhist texts to determine how tense, aspect, and modal auxiliaries were used to foreground events in narrative, provide background information, and to frame narration on two levels: the overarching sutra and embedded parables within.

Paper long abstract:

The earliest examples of extended narrative in Japanese are found in translations of Sinitic Buddhist texts. The monks who created these early Japanese renderings at the onset of the Heian period (794–1185 C.E.) had to read between the lines, both figuratively and literally, in their acts of translation. Figuratively, because Chinese lacks the complex agglutinative morphological predicate system of Japanese, so the translators had to add Japanese markers for tense, aspect, modality, and honorifics to predicates and case particles to nouns. Literally, because in order to preserve their translations in writing they used diacritic markings between, and occasionally on, the original Chinese characters to denote the appropriate Japanese morphosyntax, or word and sentence structure, and occasionally phonology, or pronunciation.

These monks used the rich Early Middle Japanese (the language of Heian-period texts’) repertoire of tense, aspect, and modality (TAM) auxiliaries—ki, keri, tu, nu, ari, and tari—to produce vivid, dynamic vernacular translations. This study examines early Heian Japanese translations of Sinitic Buddhist texts in order to determine the narrative functions of these six TAM auxiliaries. I code every sentence in the overarching narration and in quoted parables for its transitivity, lexical aspect, and function in structuring the story, focusing on sentence-final predicates that utilize TAM auxiliaries, to determine how they were employed to create narrative structure.

I have found that the established past fact auxiliary ki is used to frame the narrative; perfective aspect auxiliaries nu and tu actively progress the story; stative aspect auxiliaries ari and tari depict scenes and give background information; and the externally established fact auxiliary keri is most often used inside quotations that sum up the moral of embedded parables.

This study demonstrates that Heian-period Japanese Buddhist monks understood the overarching narrative of the Sinitic sutras they preached and framed those narratives accordingly in the act of translation using the full array of linguistic tools at their disposals.