This study examines how linguistic elements that could not be expressed in hiragana and katakana were written in the Heian period, focusing on cases where people chose not to indicate certain distinctions in writing. Given that sei-daku consonants were not written distinctively, that geminate consonants and a part of moraic nasals were not notated, and that the notation of certain materials did not reflect kaiyō-on (CjV) or gōyō-on (CwV), it is presumed that these sound variants were perceived as prosodically conditioned.

Sinographs (漢字 Ch. hanzi, Jp. kanji) largely function as logograms representing the spoken word when writing the Chinese language. When Sinographs are used to write the Japanese language, however, they tend to function ideographically. That is, historically, Sinographs serve as somewhat abstract markers of meaning whose meaning and/or pronunciation is made explicit through intertextual notation (e.g., furigana or okurigana) that relates the denotation (語義) of a Sinograph to a corresponding Japanese term. After arguing the above point, I analyze three texts, the mid-12th century Iroha jiruishō, the Muromachi Era Setsuyōshū, and the Edo Period Shogen jikō setsuyōshū, and demonstrate how the same string of Sinographs are used to represent both wago, vernacular Japanese lexical items, and kango, words originating from Chinese. Furthermore, I compare the Meiji Period Shōshū hana no niwakido, an illustrated storybook reproduced from an original plate, to a text of the same name printed in movable type and published in the so-called cardboard-cover format (ボール表紙本). By focusing my analysis on strings of Sinographs, I demonstrate the associated relationship that exists between them and Japanese lexical items, and show how such relationships are constructed not only in these two texts but also within the larger ecosystem of written Japanese. This suggests that a string of Sinographs can establish a non-phonetic associative relationship between Sinographs and Japanese lexical items, one characteristic of the Japanese language.

In this paper, we consider where and for what purpose the “dots” of Tangut characters are added. After describing the structure and strokes of Tangut characters, together with the relevant terminology, we define the Tangut “dots” in question. The author investigates the original texts of Tangut characters with dots by checking the original shapes in the Tangut dictionary “Tongyin,” which exhaustively lists all the Tangut characters. As a result, it was found that the “dots” of the Tangut characters were attached to the right of the element and constituted the “part,” not the whole character. When the environment of the appearance of dots was scrutinized, it was found that the component parts to which dots were attached could be divided into two parts: Class A: a “くノ”-type and Class B: a “匕”-type. Both classes A and B have similar component parts (ノメ，ヒ). At the time of the creation of the Tangut characters, the dots functioned as an emphatic sign that distinguished the differences between similar parts (ノメvsくノ，ヒvs匕), but the author surmises that later the mere presence or absence of dots was misidentified as a distinguishing element.

There is no positive evidence that Hittite scribes employed the signs including voiced and voiceless consonants in a contrastive manner to distinguish between voiced and voiceless values. What the Hittite scribes tried to show by orthography was a linguistic contrast between single and double consonants in intervocalic position. Single and double consonants indicate lenited and unlenited (or short and long) qualities, respectively. The Proto-Indo-European contrast of voiced/voiceless consonants, inherited also in Proto-Anatolian, was reinterpreted as one of lenited/unlenited (or short/long) in Hittite. This contrast is observed in stops, fricatives, laryngeals and sonorants. It is, however, traditionally assumed that the same contrast is not observed in affricates. We discuss this problem in this paper by analyzing the distribution of the 3 sg. present active endings, -Vzzi and -Vzi.

　　There are a small number of verbs which show the single -z- intervocalically in Old Hittite, as represented by ú-e-mi-zi (< *au-ém-i̯e-di < *au-ém-i̯e-ti) ‘finds’ and arnuzi (< *h₁r̥-né-u-di <*h₁r̥-né-u-ti) ‘(re)moves’. The relevant verbs all go back to the Proto-Anatolian forms characterized by the ending with voiced *d created by lenition rules. An obvious inference to be drawn from this fact is that the single -z- in these verbs reflects the lenited quality produced from *d by affrication before *i in its prehistory. Although the lenited *-dzi was replaced by the corresponding unlenited *-tsi (< *ti) to a large extent, the Old Hittite verbs in -z- preserve a notably archaic feature speaking for the linguistic contrast between the lenited and unlenited affricates. This claim is supported by some further pieces of evidence.

　　In the case of the historical study of dead languages, written documents are virtually the only sources of linguistic information. Furthermore, written documents are recorded by means of letters, which are nothing more than tools for indirectly representing phonetic information. In spite of these inherent difficulties, the techniques of historical linguistics enable us to obtain evidence useful for inferring language change. In this paper we have discussed a case in which markedly improved philological analyses contribute to inferring linguistic changes that occurred in the internal history of the language as well as in its prehistory.

This paper aims to account for the development of passive expletive constructions (PECs) in the history of English, especially the changing distribution of their associates, in terms of the rise of a functional category Pred(ication), as well as the change of the underlying word order within VP. By extending Tanaka and Yokogoshi’s (2010) analysis of small clauses, it is argued that there was a structural change of the small clause complement to be in PECs: from the structure lacking a functional category to the structure headed by Pred, which appeared in the fourteenth century and was established in the eighteenth century. The rise and establishment of the PredP structure are shown to be responsible for the fact that the order in which the associate precedes the passive participle became predominant after Late Middle English, finally replacing in the eighteenth century the order in which the associate immediately follows the passive participle, because the latter order can be derived only from the structure without Pred.

Tense Alternation Generalization (TAG) has been used in previous studies to account for some distinctive features of the constructions that are conceived as raising and control across tensed CP in Japanese (Uchibori 2000, Fujii 2006). Akuzawa and Kubota (2021), as well as Akuzawa and Kubota (2020) and Kubota and Akuzawa (2020), critically assessed the generalization, arguing that it is problematic. The current study attempts to respond to two of their criticisms: (i) the data used in Fujii (2006) to support the TAG-based argument for the raising analysis of the yooni naru construction are uncompelling; and (ii) the TAG approach suffers from the generalization being unexplained and stipulated, unlike the semantic approach that the two-author team proposes. To settle the first issue, we conducted an acceptability judgment experiment, whose results revealed that our participants’ judgments were in line with those reported in Fujii. As for the second criticism, the current study holds that while the criticism is right in that TAG is stipulated, their semantic analysis of control does not achieve what the TAG approach achieves by relying on the stipulation.