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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.