On the Origins of Yamada Yoshio’s Sentence Theory and the Emergence of chinjutsu as a Theoretical Term

Abstract

Yamada Yoshio (1875-1958) is widely recognised as one of the chief progenitors of modern Japanese grammatical theory, a legacy owed in large part to his ability to synthesise the achievements of Japan’s indigenous linguistic tradition with European theoretical perspectives. In his seminal publication Nihon bunpōron (‘Japanese grammatical theory’, published 1902–1908), Yamada not only laid out a comprehensive framework for the grammatical description of Japanese, but he also presented his own theory of sentence formation, which, although clearly inspired by contemporary European scholarship, reinterpreted its Western source material so as to create something truly original. In recent years, researchers have made great strides in tracing Yamada’s various influences, but many questions relating to the origin of his theory remain unanswered. In this paper, I attempt to partly reconstruct the chronology of Yamada’s theory-building, using the handwritten manuscripts of Nihon bunpōron as my primary source. By tracing how a number of key theoretical terms were used differently over the course of the writing process, I demonstrate that Yamada’s sentence theory did not emerge until in the final stages of writing, a discovery which not only changes our understanding of Nihon bunpōron as a text, but also its legacy in Japanese theoretical linguistics.