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Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to conduct a comparative study between the language of Esopo no fabulas and Feiqe monogatari and that of Toraakirabon, analysing all the collocations with koso extracted from the Corpus of Historical Japanese in order to describe the loss of kakari-musubi in Late Middle Japanese.

Paper long abstract:

Kakari-musubi is a Japanese syntactic construction in which the sentence predicate (musubi) related to an emphatic or interrogative particle (kakari particle) is in a form other than the conclusive. It is a salient characteristic of Old and Early Middle Japanese, and disappeared in the course of Late Middle Japanese. All the kakari particles require the predicate in the adnominal form except for the emphatic particle koso, which requires the predicate in the exclamative form. One of the syntactic changes involved in the loss of kakari-musubi is the merger of the conclusive and the adnominal forms. In Christian materials written in spoken language, such as Esopo no fabulas (1593) and Feiqe monogatari (1593), the only kakari-musubi attested is the one with koso, albeit with a great deal of exceptions (Doi 1959; Inoue 1969; Eguchi 1990). The use of koso with an exclamatory predicate at the end of the sixteenth century has been considered the final stage in the loss of kakari-musubi (Frellesvig 2010). However, kakari-musubi with koso is also found in the language of kyōgen dialogues written down by Ōkura Toraakira in 1642, in the eight volumes of the so-called Toraakirabon. This late appearance of the first scripts of kyōgen makes it difficult to provide its language with a precise dating, even though it does reflect many features of the spoken language of late Muromachi and Azuchi Momoyama periods.

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to conduct a comparative study between the language of Esopo no fabulas and Feiqe monogatari and that of Toraakirabon, analysing all the collocations with koso extracted from the Corpus of Historical Japanese and classifying the predicates in the musubi. Secondly, it aims to compare the language of Christian materials to that of kyōgen, in order to shed light on the importance of the latter in the reconstruction of Late Middle Japanese. The results of the analysis reveal that, whilst sharing several similarities in the morphological shape of predicates in a form other than the exclamatory, the kakari-musibi with koso is more extensively used in kyōgen dialogues than in Christian materials.