The Evolution of the Japanese Past and Perfective Suffixes (review)

In this book, an update of her 1982 dissertation, Sandness examines the change of certain inflectional suffixes of Classical Japanese. Classical Japanese had a complex system of verbal morphology, including six suffixes (-ri, -tari, -ki, -keri, -nu, -t(s)u) for indicating tense and aspect. Only one of these, in a truncated form, has survived into the modern language as the marker for perfective aspect. This book is S’s investigation into what happened to these suffixes.

The biggest obstacle S faces is the written language itself. From the Heian period (794–1185) until the end of the Muromachi period (1334–1615), written Japanese was based on the usage of the Heian court. Accordingly, the majority of the written record fails to reflect spoken language and therefore fails to reflect the natural evolution of these suffixes. As the spoken language changed, certain of the suffixes were no longer used except in set phrases. Since writers no longer had native control of some of the suffixes, they sometimes made mistakes in their usage, and these errors are reflected, to varying degrees, in what they wrote. It is in the usages that deviate from earlier norms that S is able to deduce, to the extent possible, when and how the suffixes changed.

S observes that despite the continuous study of Heian literature, there is no agreement on the meaning of the six suffixes. Her starting point is to determine the meaning of the suffixes as they were used in the Nara (710–784) and Heian periods. Another important part of S’s analysis is her evaluation of each suffix on its own. In the Japanese tradition, the six suffixes are grouped into three pairs, on the a priori assumption that the members of each pair are related to each other. One of S’s contributions is her demonstration that of this traditional grouping, only that of -ri and -tari is plausible; furthermore, she shows that, contrary to the traditional analysis, -ki and -t(s)u form a pair.

S advances research on the suffixes in other ways as well. She does not let supposed etymologies interfere with her analysis, the inclusion of which is a shortcoming of much work on the subject. Also, as noted above, she does not treat the entire corpus of written Classical Japanese as a unified whole. This allows her to see changes in the usage of the suffixes and thus avoid the ad hoc statements of exceptions and contradictory meanings that are often found in grammars of Classical Japanese. S also devotes a chapter to the suffixes in the modern dialects. Unfortunately, Japanese research on nonstandard varieties focuses mainly on pitch, accent, and vocabulary, and little information on morphology is available, so S is not able to do much analysis on the modern dialects.

Although this is an important step forward in the study of historical Japanese morphology, there are a few deficiencies. Perhaps most noticeable are the numerous errors in the Japanese examples (which are, unfortunately, unnumbered). Also, although S frequently uses the terms past, perfective, and perfect, she defines the latter two only in passing on p. 82. Also surprising is her use of the term past to describe the modern suffix -ta, which indicates perfective aspect, not past tense. It can be difficult to sort out S’s conclusions from amongst the discussion, and the book would have benefited from a page or two, perhaps presented as a table, summarizing her findings. Finally, I can see no reason to use underlining when boldface, italic, and small cap typefaces are readily available on modern computers. In spite of these shortcomings, this is a major advance in the study of historical Japanese morphology, well worth a place on the historical linguist’s bookshelf.