Typological change of alignment in Japanese: Basic research with the objective of building syntactic corpora

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 23520491
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: University of Tsukuba
• Principal Investigator: YANAGIDA Yuko 筑波大学, 人文社会系, 教授 (20243818)
• Project Period (FY): 2011-04-28 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 格配列 / 示差的項表示 / 特定性

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Within the past few decades, various proposals have been made about marking of arguments in Old Japanese (OJ) , but there is still few study about the exact circumstances determining when arguments are bare or case marked in OJ. This study examine in detail the distribution of bare and case marked arguments in OJ texts and show that OJ had ‘differential argument marking (DAM)’ associated with the three grammatical levels, 1) argument structure, 2) Syntax 3) PF (morphological spell-out) In particular, This study uses the material in the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese to examine case marked object and bare object, showing that a specific/non-specific distinction plays a major role in the case marking of objects. Thus, in OJ, accusative case marked objects are specific, but bare objects are non-specific.

Free Research Field

言語学