Particle Kashi in Early Middle Japanese

Abstract

The aim of this article is to clarify the meaning of a sentence-final article kashi through the examination of Early Middle Japanese materials. First, I focused on the characteristics of phrases preceding kashi. Then, I clarified that preceding phrases of kashi are limited to Unshared Items. Unshared items refer to the things in which facts and the grounds that can be confirmed as facts are not shared with others, such as personal opinions. Then, the meaning of kashi was examined. Kashi presupposes that the statement might differ from facts. In this article this is called Pseudo-Indetermination. In addition, I investigated a different distribution of auxiliaries on the examples of the termination of predicative form and the examples of kashi which are positioned afterward in order to ascertain these hypotheses. There were two findings. First, conjectural auxiliaries tend to be followed by kashi whereas estimated auxiliaries do not. It is explained that this difference is caused by whether the grounds that can be confirmed as facts can be shared or not. Second, ki can be followed by kashi whereas many past and perfect auxiliary verbs can not. These auxiliaries describe facts, therefore, it is difficult to become unshared items. Yet, ki can be followed by kashi because ki is seen only in examples which describe speaker's own memory. These facts confirm this article's hypothesis. It helps us to explain other conjugated form and examples in which particle zo was followed by kashi if we consider the meaning of kashi as pseudo-indetermination. It also becomes easy to explain its relationship with previous studies.