The Structure and History of Japanese: From Yamatokotoba to Nihongo (review)

Lone Takeuchi’s book surveys the development of Japanese from the eighth century to the present. The book consists of seven chapters. Ch. 1 serves as a general introduction to Japanese culture. Starting with the definition of the language and its temporal and geopolitical implications, T outlines Korean-Japanese language contact mediated by Chinese, the Chinese-Japanese diglossia, and the subsequent emergence of kana (phonograms derived from sinograms). T also discusses the sociolinguistic position of waka, poetry which played a powerful role in establishing the Japanese sense of self-expression as distinct from the Chinese counterpart (16). T proceeds to describe shifts in the prestige vernacular, with illustrative language samples spoken by different socioeconomic layers of the population in Edo (former Tokyo). The process of language standardization is examined from the viewpoint of both the center and periphery with a striking account of the sociolinguistic situation in the Ryukyu dialect. All these topics illuminate how the Japanese cultural and linguistic identity was formed.

The chapter also contains one of the building blocks for T’s major hypothesis elaborated in Ch. 7. The author suggests that the linguistic features of mid-Honshu—the region generally considered to be the center of linguistic innovations—may actually originate from the southwestern Kyushu region (which is closest to the continent) and that eastern Japan (Azuma) may have been competing with western Japan (mid-Honshu) not only politically but also linguistically. T further demonstrates difficulties in applying the mid-Honshu-centered model to account for the five major accentual classes of disyllabic nouns in modern dialects in Ch. 2, which focuses on the metrical and tonal rules in compound nouns and verbs.

The subsequent chapters deal with morphology and syntax. Ch. 3 concerns indexical expressions encoded by predicate morphology, verbs of giving and receiving, pronominal expressions, and demonstratives and numeral classifiers. T starts the chapter with social parameters that affect use of politeness expressions (Martin 1964). Following the standard analysis, T defines two types of indexical expressions: those characterizing the participants of the event and their relationship to the interlocutors (exaltation) and those based on the speech situation (politeness). T then shows how indexical expressions interact in general with the following nominal hierarchy:

speaker ‘I’>speaker’s in-group>hearer>definite animate>definite inanimate> indefinite animate>inanimate

(62)

Many of these nominal groups have further subgroups that occur under pragmatic constraints such as empathy and topic-focus distinction. Animate nouns split further into semantic-grammatical subgroups, based on ability to attach the plural suffix, presence of animate/gender marking, ability to attach title or exalted suffixes, and frequent indefinite reference. The hierarchy thus reflects general sensitivity of Japanese indexical expressions to language-universal notions such as animacy and individuation (Timberlake 1975, Yamamoto 1999). Simultaneously, this observation can be seen as a response to recent home-grown nihonjinron ‘analysis of Japanese national trait’ which regards keigo ‘politeness expressions’ as a unique linguistic, i.e. national, trait (Miller 1971).

Ch. 4 presents a synchronic analysis of the Modern Japanese (MJ) predicate structure followed by a description of the historical development of the predicate from Old Japanese (OJ)-Classical Japanese (CJ) to MJ. T characterizes the MJ verb as essentially analytic, with each (or most) of its elements capable of functioning as a predicate in its own right. A maximally extended predicate is said to have initial elements that have event-internal orientation (markers of exaltation, valence, tense-aspect, mood, and formality in a linear order from left to right) and final elements that signal speech-situational orientation (discourse markers and interclausal functions). This basic structure motivates reinterpretation of elements within a predicate; e.g. -tyau in Tokyo vernacular tukuttyau ‘complete making’, a fusion of MJ tukutte simau (sima(w)-u ‘finish’), develops into a marker of perfective aspect and even past tense (78–79).

Equally valuable is T’s new model for Japanese verbal paradigms. T reveals the opaqueness of the traditional analysis that ignores the distinction between (inter...