2018 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 255-270
The contemporary Sino-Japanese noun kekka ‘result’ has a variety of uses other than as a noun. It is used as a component of idiomatic adverbial phrases/clauses, a clause-final connective, and an adverb/conjunction. This paper investigates its various usages and recent history, analysing some modern and contemporary Japanese corpora. The findings are summarized as follows: (1) Corpus data from late 19th- to early 20th-century Japanese shows that the usage of kekka extended from a prototypical noun to a component of idiomatic adverbial phrases/clauses and to a clause-final connective during this period. (2) In the corpora from late 20th- to early 21st-century Japanese, kekka is mostly used as a component of idiomatic expressions, such as sono kekka ‘that result’, kekka-teki-ni ‘in result’, and kekka to shite ‘as a result’. This indicates that idiomaticization is in progress. Also, the adverb/conjunction-like use of kekka is increasingly attested. Shorter idiomatic expressions in which what used to precede and/or follow kekka is elided are also on the increase. (3) The extension to non-noun use of kekka and its change to shorter idiomatic expressions accompanies the semantic bleaching of its content meaning and involves its positional change to sentence-initial position.
