This paper discusses the historical change of interrogatives that occurred after Pre-Modern Japanese. At the late stage of Middle Japanese, the presence or absence of the sentence-final particle ka had come to differentiate yes/no interrogatives from wh-interrogatives, and thus ka was rarely used to mark the latter. On the other hand, in Contemporary Standard Japanese, it is not unnatural to use ka for wh-interrogatives, mainly in self-addressed questions.

This study examined the transition in the appearance ratio of ka in wh-interrogatives by extracting examples from the Corpus of Historical Japanese. The results showed that the use of ka increased significantly during the 18th and 19th centuries in an overall logistic S-curve pattern.

Furthermore, sentence-final ka tended to be used in self-addressed questions from the beginning of its appearance. Since ka also developed a usage marking embedded interrogative clauses almost during the same period, this paper assumes that a change had occurred in which ka lost its addressivity, i.e., the loss of the function to address the question to the hearer. This change caused a reinterpretation of ka into a marker of self-addressed questions, making it possible for the particle to be used in yes/no and wh-interrogatives unselectively.

In this study, I propose a sentence type called a “mockery sentence,” which is associated with the linguistic behavior of “mockery” in nominal free-standing word sentences. Here, I clarify the structure of the mockery sentence and its position in the system of nominal free-standing word sentences. There are two basic structures in mockery sentences identified by: i) vowel lengthening and fall intonation at the end of the sentence (“yowamushī↘.”), and ii) sentence beginning with ‘yā↘i’ (“yā↘i, yowamushi.”). Mockery by nominal free-standing word sentences is achieved by support of either structure.

With regard to the categories of “expressive sentences” and “conative sentences” in the system of nominal free-standing word sentences, while mockery sentences can be classed as the latter they are closer to sentences that call out to or praise others, such as “ōi, Takahashi,” or “yo, setsuyaku-jōzu.”

An examination of sentence structure reveals the ways in which the Japanese language classifies linguistic behaviors, facilitating a systematic understanding of nominal free-standing word sentences.

The attitude predicate tumori-da has been considered to correspond approximately to ‘intend’ in English. In actuality, it is used to convey volition, conviction and hypothesis. The majority of previous studies have assumed that tumori-da denotes a meaning equivalent to omou (‘think’). They so claim that the above three different usages derive from this core meaning according to morphological (i.e., tense and aspect) and semantic (i.e., volitional or non-volitional) properties of embedded predicates. In this paper, I re-examine the semantic properties of the tumori-da construction and show that it does not fall under simple epistemic predicates the way which omou does. First, by investigating the syntactic and semantic properties of the embedded clause in tumorida constructions conveying volition and conviction in detail, I demonstrate that the two usages are differentiated depending on the temporal and volitional properties of the state of affairs (P), denoted by the embedded clause, rather than solely on the morpho-semantic properties of embedded predicates as in previous studies. Second, I provide novel data showing that P needs to be brought about by the attitude holder's (x) volitional action. This is shown to also be well captured by the semantic notion of RESP-relation (Farkas 1988). Third, I also re-examine the hypothetical tumori-da construction, which is mainly realized as a subordinate clause, and demonstrate that it requires the main clause to be x's volitional action. Based on these observations I propose the following: (i) tumori-da asserts x's thought about P but at the same time presupposes some volitional action by x; (ii) the tumori-da construction shows two different semantic properties depending on the relationship between x's volitional action and P.

This paper presents a cross-dialectal survey of the functions of reduplicated adjectives in the Ryukyuan languages. The Ryukyuan languages are said to have two major adjective forms which encode property concepts: inflectional adjectives (e.g., agahatta ‘(It) was red’ in the Shiraho dialect of Yaeyaman, Southern Ryukyuan) and reduplicated adjectives (e.g., agaaga ‘red’ in Shiraho). While inflectional adjectives have been the main concern of Ryukyuan dialectology, reduplicated adjectives have largely been undiscussed, despite the latter's conspicuous dialectal variation with regard to their syntactic functions. This study aims to fill this major gap in the literature, comparing various syntactic functions of the reduplicated adjectives found in nineteen dialects (six from Northern Ryukyuan and thirteen from Southern Ryukyuan), and suggests a hierarchical generalization regarding the conspicuous dialectal variation of functions, as summarized in (1).

(1) Reduplicated adjective hierarchy

adverbial modification > nominal modification > predication

According to this hierarchy, the adverbial modification is the most accessible function of the reduplicated form of any given dialect. As the adverbial function is crucially lacking in the inflectional adjectives of a number of Ryukyuan languages, we argue that the reduplicated form fulfils this function. It is also argued that the hierarchy reflects a developmental process of the function of reduplicated adjectives, in that the reduplicated adjective first acquired the adverbial-modificational function, then the nominal-modificational function, and finally the predicative function. This hypothesis is supported by Ryukyuan data and comparison with Old Japanese.