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.