| Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 1-23 |
| Abbreviation: APJCR |
| e-ISSN: 2733-8096 |
| Publication date: 31 August 2023 |
| Received: 22 May 2023 / Received in Revised Form: 8 August 2023 / Accepted: 14 August 2023 |
| DOI: https://doi.org/10.22925/apjcr.2023.4.1.1
|
The incredible shrinking Noun phrase: Ongoing change in Japanese word formation |
| Kevin Heffernan, (Kwansei Gakuin University), JAPAN; Yusuke Imanishi (Kwansei Gakuin University), JAPAN |
| Copyright 2023 APJCR
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Abstract |
| The Japanese language, as a typical agglutinating language, permits large noun phrases (NP) containing ten or more morphemes. In this paper, we argue that the nature of the NP in Japanese is changing. Our data are drawn from the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. We conduct a series of apparent-time studies of ongoing changes in complex NPs. We first examine the length of compound nouns, followed by the usage of bound suffixes. We then examine ongoing changes in complex NPs that contain genitive case markers. Finally, we examine noun incorporation. All of our studies show a trend towards shorter, less complex NPs. Furthermore, our results suggest that the usage rate of phrases that modify the noun inside the NP (compound nouns, bound nouns, NPs containing genitive case, noun incorporation) appears to be decreasing over time. On the other hand, the usage rate of modifying material outside of the NP (positional phrases, relative clauses) appears to be increasing over time. We conclude by suggesting that our results reflect a diachronic change of decreasing synthetic morphology and increasing analytic morphology. We end by pointing out the implications of this work on our understanding syntheticity and analyticity. . |
Keywords |
| Japanese, Noun Phrase, Cyclic Change, Syntheticity, Analyticity |
References |
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The Authors |
| Kevin Heffernan is a professor at Kwansei Gakuin University. He is the creator of the Corpus of Kansai Vernacular Japanese, and he has written several articles and books about the Japanese language, including the corpus-based grammar, The Grammar of Kansai Vernacular Japanese.
Yusuke Imanishi is a professor at Kwansei Gakuin University. His research interests center around case, agreement, ergativity, nominalization, and wh constructions among others. He has conducted fieldwork research on Kaqchikel (Mayan) and Kikai (Ryukyuan). His works have appeared in international journals such as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (Springer) and Studia Linguistica (Wiley). |
The Authors’ Addresses |
| First and Corresponding Author Kevin Heffernan Professor Kwansei Gakuin University 1 Gakuen-Uegahara, Sanda, JAPAN E-mail: kevin@kwansei.ac.jp Co-author  DOI QR CODE |
