Abstract and Keywords
This article considers the history of grammaticalisation in the Japanese language. It explains that Japanese has been a strictly head-final subject-object-verb order (SOV) language with nominative-accusative alignment, and with frequent omission of argument noun phrases, throughout its documented history. The first type of contact-induced grammaticalisation includes the rise of complex postpositions. In the spoken language there are only few genuine examples of grammatical influence due to language contact.
Keywords: Japanese language, grammaticalisation, SOV language, nominative-accusative alignment, noun phrases, complex postpositions, spoken language, language contact
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.