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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Old Japanese suffixes -(r)are- and -(r)aye- using corpus data from the Man’yōshū, norito, and senmyō. It argues that their meanings are semantically related to spontaneous intransitive constructions and identifies rare passive-like uses with inanimate subjects.

Paper long abstract

This study investigates the meanings of the suffixes -(r)are- and -(r)aye- in Old Japanese by examining their usage in the Man’yōshū, norito (ritual prayers), and senmyō (imperial edicts), using the Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ) developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. It explores the relationship between the meanings expressed by these constructions and the spontaneous meanings associated with r-row lower bigrade (RS2) and y-row lower bigrade (YS2) intransitive verb constructions.

Previous studies have argued that -(r)are- and -(r)aye-, well known as suffixes expressing passive, non-intentional, and potential meanings, were reanalyzed as grammatical affixes through analogy with the inflectional endings of RS2 and YS2 verbs, respectively (Yanagida 1989). However, the relationship between these grammatical suffixes and intransitive verb constructions has not been examined in detail. This study proposes a hypothesis concerning the morphological extraction of the two suffixes and investigates the semantic relationship between the meanings they encode and those expressed by intransitive constructions.

The analysis shows that, although previous research has claimed that Old Japanese -(r)are- and -(r)aye- lack passive constructions with inanimate subjects (Kawamura 2012), there are a small number of instances that can be interpreted as anticausative uses corresponding to ordinary inanimate-subject passives. It is suggested that such passive-like constructions with inanimate subjects were later marginalized during the Heian period, when narrative prose written in kana flourished and texts increasingly came to be structured from a human-centered perspective, in which other uses of these suffixes became dominant.

Reference

Kawamura, Futoshi (2012) Rarukei-jutsugo-bun-no kenkyū [Studies on -(r)rare- form predicate sentences]. Tokyo, Kuroshio Publishers.

Yanagida, Masashi (1989) Jodōshi “yu/rayu”=to “ru/raru”=to=no kankei. Commemorative Anthology of Japanese Linguistics in Honor of Professor Mitsuo Okumura's Retirement. Tokyo: Ofusha (Reprint in A Historical Phonology of the Japanese Language from the Muromachi Period Onward. 1993, 717-740).