A number of previous studies have made an analysis of the adnominal usage of the Old Japanese auxiliary mu based on inductive methods; however, the essential problems have been left unsolved. This paper investigates and describes the adnominal usage of mu based on a deductive method. Specifically, this paper compares and describes the following two different types of noun phrases (NP): Type A: Inflected word+φ+hito (e.g., wakaki hito) Type B: Inflected word+mu+hito (e.g., wakakara-mu hito) An investigation of the syntactic features of these two types of NP in Japanese classics shows that Type B can be described as a noun phrase for non-reality; only Type B NP had restrictions in terms of types of predicates (i.e., they do not co-occur with existential predicates or predicates marked with tense/aspect forms), and co-occurence with expressions of time, place and quantity (with some exceptions which can be explained). The paper concludes that auxiliary mu in Old Japanese functioned as a marker indicating non-reality of the noun phrase.

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This paper examines the nature of Final-Attributive sentences in Heian Japanese conversational texts, in comparison with sentences ending in the canonical Conclusive form and the Focus Concord construction (kakarimusubi) used with particles namu and zo. The following three results were obtained: (a) The Final-Attributive form is often found with verbs of emotion, thought, or perception in sentences relating concrete events or the speaker's evaluation/comments. (b) It is often found with adjectives denoting emotion but not with adjectives denoting properties. (c) It is found with auxiliary verbs denoting (1) emotion/thought, (2) past/perfect, (3) conjecture, (4) negation, (5) assertion, in decreasing order. In conclusion, the Final-Attributive in conversational texts of Heian Japanese is considered to be a form which indicates that the information is in the speaker's territory.

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This article aims to clarify the semantic field of irassharu, a Japanese honorific form of iku ('go'), kuru ('come') , and iru ('exist'). To achieve the goal, a questionnaire survey was conducted to 146 grownups born and raised in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama Prefectures. Works of fiction by 76 writers born and brought up in Tokyo were also investigated. The data collected empirically demonstrates that irassharu is now being used less and less with the meaning of 'go', while it is still widely used to mean 'come' and 'exist.' Although it has been claimed that the respectful attitude shown with irassharu neutralizes the direction in which the agent is headed, this study suggests that the main reason for this change is that the respect tends to be expressed more often when the agent's motion relates to the speaker. This speaker's preference results in irassharu expressing the agent's movement when the goal is the speaker's position (or viewpoint). Movement to goals other than the speaker, in consequence, is excluded from the semantic field of irassharu, since the relevant movement has less relation to the speaker.

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This study addresses the elision of eomplement-taking predicates (CTPs) in Japanese interview discourse, and examines the discourse-syntactic contexts which facilitate the elision. A frequency-based approach is used to analyze this ellipsis and related issues concerning CTP. Japanese is regarded as an ideal SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language in the sense that the language maintains the order of dependent-head consistently with respect to all types of constituents. Grammatical subjects are often unexpressed, and even CTPs are omitted in unplanned discourse, leaving only the complementizer/quotation marker to in the clause. In interview discourse, the overall frequency of CTP elision is relatively low (32.1%); however, when adverbial clauses precede to-marked clauses, the elision of CTP increases. Of the four types of adverbial clauses found in the database (cause/reason, concessive, conditional and temporal clauses), cause/reason and concessive clauses most frequently co-occur with to-marked clauses; 75.2% of these cause/reason and concessive clauses elide CTP. Furthermore, when the preceding adverbial clause contains an embedded clause with to and an overt verb of thinking or saying, the following to-marked clause shows an even higher rate of CTP elision. In addition to these discourse-syntactic properties, to-marked clauses overwhelmingly (more than 90%) mark the speaker's (i.e. 1^<st> person) reproduction of his/her own utterance or thought in the past, expressing the speaker's attitude towards the content of the to-marked clause. It follows from these observations that the elision of CTP has a consistent relation to discourse-syntactic structure and that to functions as an evidential, indicating relatively firm sources.

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In Ancient Japanese, the kakarimusubi construction of a constituent marked with the particle so agreeing with a predicate in the adnominal form (hereafter 'so adnominal form construction') was rarely used with sentence-final auxiliaries indicating conjecture (i.e., mu, ramu, kemu, mashi, beshi, and rashi). On the other hand, in Heian-period Japanese, the construction could take these auxiliaries except for rashi. The aim of this paper is to discuss why such a difference is observed between these two eras, and its relationship with their syntactic structures. This paper points out the following four observations: 1) The so adnominal form construction was used when the speaker regarded information for the grounds of the utterance as a fact; 2) The construction tended to end with stative predicates; 3) Until the late seventh century (the Hakuho period), adjectival predicates in main clauses were followed by conjecture auxiliaries under the same condition as the so adnominal form construction; 4) Until the late seventh century, adjectival sentences were chiefly used under the same condition as the so adnominal form construction: i.e., in utterances based on the recognition of certain information as fact. Based on these observations, the paper asserts the following two points: 1) The so adnominal form construction had common features with adjectival sentences with respect to their functional as well as their syntactic features. 2) There is a possibility that the change of the so adnominal form constructions was influenced by the change of the adjectival sentences.

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