It is generally believed that "ru/raru-form" is used only in negative sentences in the classical era, and the usage is expanded to include affirmative sentences in the Middle Ages. This paper explores the history of evolution of usage of "ru/raru-form" as a potential expression in affirmative sentences. This paper argues that "ru/raru-form" can be divided into four types: (I) Individual situations already actualized; (II) Permanent situations; (III) Generality; (IV) Individual situations not actualized. I will show that type (I), (II) and (III) are used for <already achieved potential phrases> before the Middle Ages, and type (IV) appears as <un-realized potential phrases> in the Early Modern. Also, this paper suggests one factor for the appearance of <un-realized potential phrases> is a change in how un-realisted situations are expressed.

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The purpose of this study is to clarify the emergence and disappearance of "[セン]" (Sen), a variant glyph of "銭" (Sen). Early twentieth century handwritten documents were investigated in order to clarify the onset and decline of "[セン]" in daily usage. As a result of this investigation, it became clear that "[セン]" appeared around 1872-1873 and went out of usage in the mid-1940s. The main factors involved in the rise and fall of the variant glyph "[セン]" are the change of the monetary system, and the change in usage frequency of "銭" accompanying inflation. When adopted as a monetary unit in 1871, the usage frequency of "銭" greatly increased. However, the usage frequency decreased gradually due to inflation in the years following. When the monetary unit "銭" was abolished in 1953, the decline in usage frequency became decisive. The time in which the usage frequency of "銭" fluctuated is in agreement with the rise and fall of the use of the character "[セン]" observed in the handwritten document investigation. From the above, it can be concluded that the main factors in the rise and fall of the character "[セン]" were the change of the monetary system and inflation.

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For high-level and accurate study of the classical Japanese language, a morphologically annotated diachronic corpus is essential. In order to construct an annotated corpus, automatic morphological analysis is necessary, but such morphological analysis of classical Japanese has been considered difficult to implement. Given this situation, we developed a new electronic dictionary, "UniDic for Early Middle Japanese", which makes analysis of classical Japanese practical. This dictionary was created by expanding the entries in UniDic (for Contemporary Japanese) and creating a training corpus of Early Middle Japanese based on technique of the statistical machine learning. The new dictionary achieves a high accuracy rate of approximately 97% (approximately 96% when the target text contains unknown words) in analyzing kana literature from the Heian era. This dictionary allows users to apply new research methods to classical Japanese, including complex searches and statistical analyses, which were previously impossible. Because UniDic entries are regularized in Short Unit Words, which are designed to reduce discrepancy and keep uniformity, UniDic users can compare results of analyzed texts beyond the difference of literature works and the times. UniDic for Early Middle Japanese is available to the public gratis and used for construction of the Heian period series of the Corpus of Historical Japanese.

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In the Japanese school grammar, there are six forms of conjugation patterns. However, the imperative form was rarely included in them until about 1900. This paper considers how the imperative form was dealt with by authors such as MOTOORI Norinaga (本居宣長), FUJITANI Nariakira (富士谷成章), MOTOORI Haruniwa (本居春庭), SUZUKI Akira (鈴木朖), TOJO Gimon (東条義門), TOGASHI Hirokage (富樫広蔭), SUZUKI Shigetane (鈴木重胤), and others in reference grammars of the late Edo period (18th through the early 19th centuries). In classical Japanese, there are two patterns of the imperative form: one ends with the vowel "e", and the other with "-yo". While Norinaga and Nariakira sometimes consider them as teniwoha (particles, auxiliary verbs, suffixes, and so on), Haruniwa treats the former in the conjugation system and "-yo" as teniwoha. As a result, the treatment of the imperative form was ranged between the conjugation system and teniwoha. Therefore, the imperative form was not included in grammatical tables for conjugation, and it was treated as a separate entity. This background was the reason why it took so long to settle the position of the imperative form in conjugation tables.

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