The History of Japanese Grammar and the Study of Grammatical Change

Abstract

When discussing “grammatical change in Japanese,” it is important to capture both the specificity of “Japanese” and the generality of “grammatical change” simultaneously. There are two main approaches to studying this topic: examining the history of Japanese grammar through the lens of general principles of grammatical change identified in other languages (e.g., studies on “grammaticalization” as applied to Japanese) and exploring the generality of grammatical change by focusing on the history of Japanese grammar itself. The latter approach is adopted in this study. By organizing instances of what materials were used to create function words (grammatical forms) in the history of Japanese grammar—referred to here as “function word production”—it is possible to classify a broad range of cases, within which “grammaticalization” represents just one category. In functional word production, there are highly frequent, prominent, and less common types, and this perspective can explain the reasons for these differences. However, this perspective represents only one way of understanding grammatical changes. To address these limitations, individual case studies that do not fit within this framework are introduced, reaffirming the importance of detailed, specific research.