Ga-No Conversion and Idiolectal Variations in Japanese

Abstract

Variations within a single dialect have often been referred to as ‘free variations’. But this terminology is quite a bit misleading, since it tends to imply that an individual speaker allows any of the variants. Recent investigations have revealed that the so-called ‘free variations’ may not in fact be free variations for an individual speaker. There are cases where an individual speaker consistently follows one variation although the dialect as a whole allows more than one variant. Variations of this sort, which cannot be accounted for in terms of geographic nor of sociological divisions, we shall henceforth refer to as ‘idiolectal variations’.
The existence of idiolectal variations in this sense is not a new discovery, but systematic investigations have not been made until quite recently. For some of the results of work on idiolectat variations in English, see Carden (1970), Elliott et al.(1969), and Greenbaum and Quirk (1970). Unfortunately, however, it seems to me that there has appeared no such work on like phenomena in Japanese. The present paper will present one area of syntax of the Tokyo dialect of Japanese which clearly exhibits an idiolectal variation and will discuss how general linguistic theory could shed light on such phenomena.