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Paper short abstract:

In contrast to the –(r)are- constructions in Konjaku Monogatari-shu, where spontaneous is rarely used and public honorific is the dominant, spontaneous is the most common in Genji Monogatari. This is due to the text types of a mixed Japanese-Chinese style and a typical Japanese text style.

Paper long abstract:

Regarding the -(r)are- construction in Classical Japanese, the meanings of spontaneous, passive, potential and honorific are generally accepted. However, it is known to have a usage of "promotor use" (also called public honorific) in the Chinese-influenced writing style. The use of "promotor" was pointed out as a case in which the object of respect is ambiguous, and is used when an organization such as the imperial court publicly holds some kind of event. This "promotor use" is a construction type that has been regarded as an honorific usage because the object is sometimes indicated by the accusative case, although its function is very similar to that of the passive usage of the inanimate subject in Contemporary Japanese.

We compared the -(r)are- constructions in the Konjaku Monogatari-shu, a collection of tales from the Kamakura period (1185-1333) known for its mixed Japanese-Chinese writing style, with those in the Genji Monogatari, a representative Japanese writing style of the Heian period (794-1185). The results of the survey showed that in Genji, spontaneous use is most common, followed by passive and potential, while in Konjaku, spontaneous is rarely used, and promotor use (public honorific), which is rarely found in Genji, is conspicuous. This may be related to the difference in the text types of the two works. While in Konjaku more Chinese words and more verbs are used to express emotions, in Genji more emotional adjectives such as "aware" and "okashi" are used to express emotions more directly. This is due to the fact that Konjaku is an objective text that is told from a distance from the characters, whereas Genji is a subjective text that is told with sympathy for the characters. It is presumed that the -(r)are- constructions have developed under the influence of these textual structures.

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Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to analyse the morphosyntactic structures in the language of kyōgen from a sociolinguistic perspective, i.e. highlighting the differences in usage in various categories of characters, using the Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ).

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to analyse the morphosyntactic structures in the language of kyōgen from a sociolinguistic perspective, i.e. highlighting the differences in usage in various categories of characters, using the Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ).

It is difficult to date the language of kyōgen, a form of comic theatre developed in the 14th century, since the transcription of the first texts only started at the beginning of the Tokugawa period. The decision to put in writing the dialogues, until then handed down orally, was probably due to the need to codify and define a repertoire in a language that was beginning to become obsolete. The first transcription in dialogic form is the so-called Toraakirabon, in eight volumes, written by Ōkura Toraakira in 1642. In the preface, he states that it is an accurate transcription of what had been transmitted for generations. It is therefore one of the most valuable sources for the reconstruction of the language spoken at the turn of the 16th-17th centuries and for this reason it has been included in the CHJ, in the section on the Muromachi period (Ichimura 2014). As in shōmono and kirishitan shiryō, the language of Toraakirabon presents all the morphosyntactic changes occurred in Late Middle Japanese, giving us the image of a very dynamic linguistic stage, in which new forms have not yet completely replaced the more archaic ones. In some cases, it is possible to observe a sociolinguistic variation in the use of morphosyntactic structures, which may depend on the social class or the gender of the character (Yamada 1997, Hachiya 1998, Watanabe 2015).

In analysing the morphosyntactic structures in the language of kyōgen, this paper will focus on the use of the particles ga and no in nominative and attributive function and the decline of kakari-musubi with koso. The analysis will reveal that the linguistic characterisation has been rendered not only through the lexicon, but also, as in the case of female characters, through a particular use of the morphosyntactic structures, which appears less influenced by linguistic innovations.

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Paper short abstract:

This study examines the semantics and pragmatics of the nominalizing suffix -aku in early-Heian (9th-century C.E.) kundoku discourse. It marks predicates as facts that can be evaluated in dialogue or qualified in narrative passages. I thus argue that -aku performs a modal discourse function.

Paper long abstract:

Nominalized sentences in Japanese—those ending with a nominal construction, rather than a finite predicate—often express a speaker’s attitude toward an event or situation. This has been the case throughout the history of the language, although there have been shifts in the morphemes involved and how the nominalization process interacts with the predicate paradigm system.

This study focuses on the discourse function of the nominalizing suffix -aku in early-Heian (9th-century C.E.) narratives embedded in Japanese renditions of Sinitic Buddhist texts translated via gloss. In these texts, the nominalizer -aku could be used sentence-finally to express heightened emotion, as in (1), and to create a circumulous quotative construction, as in (2).

(1) Kanasiki ka ya. Wa ga aiko wo usinapi-turaku.

painful Q SPF. I GEN beloved.child ACC lose-PFV-NMLZ

‘Oh how painful! That I have lost my beloved child.’

(2) Wao ipaku “[Quotation]” to ipu.

king say-NMLZ COMP say

‘The king says, “[Quotation].”’

All -aku nominalizations form event, rather than participant, nominalized clauses and when they are used sentence-finally, such as in (1), they are referential predicates that characters evaluate subjectively, such as being wonderful, sad, fearful, painful, etc. Sentence-final -aku nominalizations only occur in dialogues quoted by narrators in these texts. Outside of dialogue, narrators use -aku before almost every quote, as in (2), before concluding with, most often, the same verb of loquation in a finite form.

By examining -aku in the extended discourse of 9th-century texts rendered via kundoku (‘vernacular reading’), we can expand our understanding of the morpheme’s functions beyond what we find in the more limited, primarily poetic, 8th-century data. The suffix -aku marks predicates as facts that can be targets of evaluation by characters in dialogue, such as (1) and presents predicates as facts to be the target qualification—rather than evaluation—before quotations by first noting the manner in which words are said before qualifying the contents of the speech act, such as (2). By taking the discourse context into consideration, we can better understand the modal semantics and pragmatics of -aku beyond its surface function as a nominalizing morpheme.