Alignment change and voice alternation in Japanese: A corpus based study

2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19K00594
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Review Section: Basic Section 02060:Linguistics-related
• Research Institution: University of Tsukuba
• Principal Investigator: Yanagida Yuko 筑波大学, 人文社会系(名誉教授), 名誉教授 (20243818)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: アラインメント / 活格 / 心理使役交替 / 非典型的格表示 / ヴォイス

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This research focuses on changes in the case system from the perspective of linguistic typology, within the context of historical studies of the Japanese language. Cross-linguistically, changes in case systems are triggered by the historical alternation of voice (e.g., from accusative-type passive to ergative-type transitive verbs). Old Japanese (around the 8th century) exhibits characteristics of an active-stative case system. To clarify the relationship with voice during the process of change to the nominative-accusative system from the Heian period onward, I conducted an empirical study on how the case system changes by collecting large-scale data from the Corpus of Historical Japanese (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics) and the Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, University of Oxford).

Free Research Field

言語学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

我が国では日本語史は国語学の領域であり、日本語の枠内での伝統的な記述文法が主流である。言語類型論、生成文法理論の言語学的方法論を用いて日本語の古典資料を分析する試みは日本ではほとんど行われてこなかった。理論的枠組みを用いて古典資料の実証研究をすると、今まで日本語独自の変化として記述されてきた変化に、言語変化の一般性・普遍性に関わる現象が多く存在することがわかる。日本語は世界的にみても歴史資料のもっとも豊富な言語のひとつであり、言語学的視点から日本語史の実証研究を行う学術的意義は非常に大きい。