Abstract
This paper examines two types of nominalization (zero type and no-type henceforth) found in the Kamigata variety of Classical Japanese, with an exclusive focus on argument positions. It aims to give an account of the historical development of the no-type nominalization based on the following two facts. First, the nominalizer no started to be employed as a regular means to nominalize (i.e. head a noun phrase carrying) the adnominal clause two hundred years or so after it first began to attach to adnominal clauses in the Middle Japanese. During this period, the nominalization construction was used both for the referential and event uses with no statistically significant difference in frequency. Second, the no-type nominalization started to replace the zero type first in the referential use (during the Meiwa-An'ei era to the Kansei-Bunka era) then in the event use (during the Bunsei-Tenpo era to Taisho era). These facts indicate that there is no reason to believe that no was originally a pronoun designating a person or thing. Rather, it is reasonable to assume that the morpheme was a cognate of the genitive no, which does not have any specific referent. Furthermore, it is argued that the development of the no-type nominalization over the zero type is more naturally explained by addressing the structural reanalysis that occurred in the referential use of nominalization than the loss of the distinction between the conclusive and adnominal forms as often argued in the literature. This hypothesis is supported by the data from other dialects.
