Semantic Borrowing through Chinese Characters and Vernacular Reading in Japanese from a Language Contact Perspective

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25870077
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Japanese linguistics; Linguistics
• Research Institution: Yamagata University
• Principal Investigator: Zisk Matthew Joseph 山形大学, 理工学研究科, 助教 (70631761)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 意味借用 / 言語借用 / 言語接触 / 日本語史 / 漢文訓読 / 定訓 / 中世漢字仮名交じり文データベース

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In this research, I investigated the causes and effects of semantic borrowing as well as other forms of linguistic borrowing through kanji and the vernacular reading of Chinese texts (kanbun) in Japanese. I found that in addition to semantic loans, a large number of calques, both lexical and morphosyntactic, from Chinese are observed in Japanese and these loans are a direct result of two sociolinguistic phenomena unique to Japan: teikun (prescribed readings of kanji) and kanbun kundoku (vernacular reading of kanbun or 'text transposition').
In order to survey the spread of such borrowed forms to native literature, it was necessary to survey a large number of pre-modern, especially Late Middle Japanese (LMJ), texts. Thus, another crucial part of this project consisted of digitalizing such texts. In total, my team and I digitalized 17 LMJ kanji-kana mixed script texts totaling approximately 1,730,000 characters and plan to release the database on the world wide web in the near future.

Free Research Field

日本語学