I discuss the diachronic change of sani-construction which consists of a sani-clause and a main clause: fune-no mutukasisa-ni fito-no ife-ni uturu ('since the ship was unbearable, I moved from the ship to someone's house.'); the origin of the sani-construction, the processes of its historical development and the formation of a causal particle sani. Originally, the sani-construction in the tenth century was semantically constrained. However, as time went on from the eleventh century, this constraint had weakened, and in the fifteenth century disappeared. I consider these facts as a qualitative change in causal sentences. That is, the original sani-construction is characterized as a causal sentence by the semantic relation between the sani-clause and the main clause. On the other hand, the sani-construction in the fifteenth century is characterized as a causal sentence by the causal particle sani. The formation of this particle that developed from the sani-construction is explained as a case of lexicalization in that a series of originally separate morphemes was reanalyzed into a monomorpheme and causality was lexicalized in the form sani by the loss of the boundary betweeen sa and ni.

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This paper first examines the publication date of Exercises in the Yokohama Dialect, the only sizeable source material for the Yokohama Dialect, a Japanese pidgin that formed in the early 1860s soon after the opening of the port of Yokohama, establishing that the first edition appeared in 1873. By examining contemporary Japanese sources, it is further documented that by no later than 1861, business talk between foreigners and Japanese was being conducted in this pidjin-Japanese by both parties, and that Exercises in the Yokohama Dialect is a reliable source for this pidjin. The remainder of the paper examines Yokohama kotoba, a term used in later works written in Japanese, and the contemporary Ikokugen, which has been cited as a source material for Yokohama kotoba, and claims that these can not be regarded as proof that an English-based form of pidgin was used in Yokohama around the time of the opening of the port.

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This article describes the paradigm of predicates in Miyagi-Nakada dialect. Over the past few years, several studies have been made on the tense and aspect systems of Tohoku dialects. However, what seems to be lacking is a systematic description of all predicates, including not only verbal predicates but also adjectival and nominal predicates, and the perspective of an aspect-tense-mood system, not just an aspect-tense system. Thus, this paper examines the paradigm of predicates in Miyagi-Nakada dialect from an aspect-tense-mood system perspective. As a result, it was found that the dialect is characterized by the following three points: 1) There is no -ke form that functions as a past tense marker. 2) There are two forms for past tense in the whole paradigm of predicates in this dialect: namely, -ta and -tatta. 3) The -tatta is a marked form indicating past evidentiality.

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