A historical study on the formalization and grammaticalization of Japanese Nouns

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 22520464
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Japanese linguistics
• Research Institution: Nagoya University
• Principal Investigator: MIYACHI Asako 名古屋大学, 文学研究科, 准教授 (10335086)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): KATAOKA Kiyoko 神奈川大学, 外国語学部, 准教授 (80462810)
• Project Period (FY): 2010-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 国語学 / 文法化 / 助詞 / 助動詞 / 非存在文 / 叙述 / 形式名詞 / とりたて

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In modern Japanese, functional words derived from nouns are specialized into three types: particles with negative polarity, limited particles, and auxiliary verbs. In this study, we observed the constraints of formalization and differentiation at work in the process of historical change in functional words, kiri, hoka, dake and sentence final nouns, and we considered the structure underlying their grammaticalization. As a result, the following two points were revealed: First, the acquisition of new grammatical features occurs in parallel with the acquisition of different meaning properties as a noun phrase, such as attributes, quantities and exclusions. Second, the specialization of functional words has been greatly affected by the lexical meaning of the original noun.

Free Research Field

日本語学