A comparative study on verbal affixes and auxiliary verbs as funtional heads in Japanese and Korean

2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 20K00555
• 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: Nanzan University
• Principal Investigator: Aoyagi Hiroshi 南山大学, 人文学部, 教授 (60212388)
• Project Period (FY): 2020-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: 日本語 / 韓国語 / 使役 / 受動 / 補助動詞 / 文法化 / 構造的縮約

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Japanese and Korean are both head-final agglutinative languages, where verb stems can be suffixed with auxiliary elements to express a wide variety of meaning. First, while the causative -sase is contrasted with the passive -rare in Japanese, the 4 passive suffixes {i, hi, li, ki} can also mean causative in Korean. Next, only one suffix is allowed per verb stem in Korean; hence, it does not have a counterpart of the causative-passive sentence neko-ga Taro-ni nezumi-o tabe-sase-rare-ta (the cat was made to eat the rat by Taro) in Japanese. All these considerations seem to suggest that grammaticalization has not been advanced in Korean as much as in Japanese. However, data from pre-modern Seoul Korean and Kyungsang dialects show that Korean had a stage where more than one suffixes were allowed per verb stem. This indicates that Seoul Korean has undergone a syntactic change that "bundles" functional heads, and as a result, it exhibits the narrower possibility of verbal suffixation today.

Free Research Field

言語学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

現代韓国標準語においては、(i)受動接辞が使役接辞と同形であり、(ii)一つの語幹には一つの接辞しか付加せず、(iii)本動詞から補助動詞に文法化したものが限られている、ことから韓国語における文法化の程度は日本語より低いとみられがちである。本研究は、(i)と(ii)については、前近代韓国語や慶尚道方言等を参照すると、韓国語にも二重接辞が許された時代があったことは確実で、Voice-Cause bundlingという構造的縮約現象を経て、(i)使役から受動が派生すると同時に(ii)二重接辞が折り畳まれて単純化したという可能性を初めて示唆した。ただし、(iii)に関する全容解明は今後の課題である。