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.