Grammaticalization of constructions with andative and ventive verbs in Japanese
As a result of grammaticalization, two Japanese constructions with a ventive (kuru) or andative (iku) auxiliary have developed a wide range of types of usage. This paper aims to test a hypothesis that the more grammaticalized types of usage appeared in the language earlier than the less grammaticalized ones. The hypothesis is based on such well-known cases of grammaticalization as the contemporary English verb will which can function as both an auxiliary and a lexical verb, with the degree of its grammaticalization depending on its actual function. The study was split into two phases.
First, I conducted a synchronic analysis of the two constructions in Modern Japanese by 1) classifying the types of their usage, and 2) determining the degree of grammaticalization for each type. For the latter, I explored the acceptability of -(r)are-honorification for the two auxiliaries using a questionnaire survey. The experimental results, which were statistically analyzed (one- and two-way ANOVA with post-hoc Tukey HSD), indicate that the most grammaticalized type of usage for kuru is the inverse and for iku, the distributive type. Notably, the inverse type demonstrates a higher degree of grammaticalization compared to the distributive.
Second, I compared these constructions with diachronically related constructions in the Old (700–800 AD), Early Middle (800–1200 AD), Late Middle (LMJ, 1200–1600) and Modern (NJ, 1600–) Japanese. The data was collected from the Corpus of Historical Japanese [CHJ] and from earlier studies on the subject matter [Inoue 1962; Kojima 1998]. Chronologically, examples of the inverse type appear later in the corpus than any other type of usage for kuru, with the distributive usage of iku showing a similar picture. Importantly, though, the inverse type appears in the language earlier than the distributive type.
The results of the questionnaire survey and corpus analysis partially corroborate the diachronic hypothesis: as far as each verb is considered separately, the most grammaticalized usage types prove to be the most recent ones (the “inverse” usage for kuru and the distributive usage for iku). However, with the two verbs put into the same category, the diachronic hypothesis does not hold: the inverse, the most grammaticalized usage type seems to have developed at an earlier stage than the synchronically less grammaticalized distributive type. This indicates that the two constructions must have developed independently despite the fact that in some usages they can be viewed as members of a single grammatical category in Modern Japanese. Following [Shimizu 2010], I also hypothesize that the inverse type might have developed from the inchoative type.
