The establishing of Japanese existential verb iru and Grammaticalization of teiru forms

Abstract

Based on historical Japanese-language data, this paper argues that the development of teiru-forms, the durative aspect forms employed in Modern Japanese, is closely linked to the development of the modern existential verb iru. As noted by Kinsui (1983, 2006), although the modern existential verb iru is a stative verb, the existential verb wiru used in Old Japanese, from which iru partly originated, is considered to be a change-of-stateverb describing the change from a standing to a sitting position. Since wiru is a change-of state verb, iru is considered to have developed not directly from wiru but from its stative counterpart witari (Kinsui, 2006). The historical Japanese-language data discussed in this paper suggest that the development from witari to the existential verb iru deeply affected the grammaticalization of the teiru forms; the establishment of the teiru forms, which acquired a durative aspectual meaning in the modern period of Japanese history, is considered to reflect the emergence of the existential verb iru. Based on the examination of the interdependency of the iru and teiru forms, this study concludes that teiru-forms are derived from the semantic bleaching of iru and the fusion of a biclausal structure, composed of a te-form clause and a main clause whose predicate is iru, into a monoclausal structure.