Continuity and Discontinuity between Early-Modern Japanese and Modern Japanese Observed in Sino-Japanese Verbs : A Corpus-based Analysis(<Special Issue>Current Topics and Prospects in the Study of Modern Japanese)

Abstract

In this paper, focusing mainly on the transitivity of Sino-Japanese verbs, we compared early-modern Japanese and modern Japanese based on the data of two corpora. We chose the Meiroku Zasshi Corpus (Meiroku) to represent early-modern Japanese and the Yomiuri Shimbun Corpus (Yomiuri) to represent modern Japanese. First, we classified Sino-Japanese verbs that appear in Meiroku into two groups: those that also appear in Yomiuri and those that do not. Next, we investigated changes from early-modern to modern Japanese by way of comparison with the Taiyo Corpus (Taiyo), which covers the middle and later years of early-modern Japanese, using it as an intermediate stage between Meiroku and Yomiuri. Among other findings, we found that the transitivity of a verb was less likely to change from early-modern to modern Japanese if the verb was transitive in Meiroku than if it was intransitive.