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date: 24 February 2021

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

Heiko Narrog

Heiko Narrog is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies of Tohoku University. He holds two PhDs in Linguistics in Germany and Japan, and his publications include Modality in Japanese: The Layered Structure of the Clause and Hierarchies of Functional Categories (Benjamins, 2009), Modality, Subjectivity, and Semantic Change. A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (OUP, 2012), and The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization (OUP, 2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis (2nd ed; OUP, 2015), both co-edited with Bernd Heine.

Toshio Ohori

Toshio Ohori graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, and is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo. His main areas of interest are semantics, linguistic typology (with special focus on complex sentences), grammaticalization, and discourse analysis. His publications include Studies in Japanese Grammaticalization (1998, editor), Cognitive Linguistics (2002, in Japanese), 'Coordination in Mentalese' (2004), and 'Pragmatic factors in the development of a switch-adjective language' (2008, with Julia Koloskova). More information can be obtained at: http://gamp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~tohori/ohori.html

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