In the thesis I test the hypothesis that Late Old Japanese (LOJ) is not, as has been claimed by a number of scholars, a language that is innately "vague", but that it is capable of conveying meaning clearly. To prove this I analyse the text of the Genji Monogatari in a number of ways. I study the usage of honorifics in the text and the relationship between honorific usage and court rank. I show that honorific usage very often obviates the need for grammatical subjects and objects, and where honorifics or the context are not sufficient, the author introduces subjects to clarify the meaning of the text. Furthermore, I demonstrate that over brief sections of text, one character might be "tagged" with a particular honorific in order to identify them. Status at the Heian court was determined by court rank, and the higher a person's rank, the more honorifics had to be used. I investigate how characters could be identified when several people of similar ranks interacted. This will show that use by the author of the category of theme as well as occasional subjects serves to identify characters. I examine the applicability of the phenomenon of switch reference to LOJ, attempting to determine how far it may have enabled the ommission of grammatical subjects, and where LOJ presents problems for the canonical account of switch reference. I examine syntactic differences between narrative and quotation, and excerpts where there are differences over where quotations begin, and cases where different characters' quotations follow each other directly with no overt marking to separate them. Finally, I study personal reference, covering the link between characters' sobriquets and the type of scene in which they are appearing, and the usage of personal pronouns and demonstratives in the text.

This thesis aims to set the Engishiki Norito (hereafter Norito), a group of early Japanese liturgical texts, in the context of the broader Old Japanese textual tradition and, in the process, draw attention to their value as literary artefacts. This is achieved by valorizing the role in the texts of rhetoric - defined broadly as meaningful units of repetitive language - and demonstrating that rhetorical structures similar to those found in the Norito exist throughout the corpus of Old Japanese literature, as far as it is extant. There have only been two substantial attempts to engage with the repetitive language in the Norito as a network of structures or systems recognizable as rhetoric (Inamura & Inamura, 1956; Kameyama, 1995). While still valuable, these studies embody the combined legacies of diverse traditional discourses, borrowed Western notions of veracity versus ornament and narratives of continuity poorly applied to early Japan that have affected Norito scholarship generally. In particular, they do not pay close attention to the syntax, morphology and phonology of Old Japanese encoded in the texts, as distinct from later forms of Japanese. Neither do they emphasize the extent of the close intertextual bonds the Norito share with other Old Japanese texts, or the associative potential of logography in a textual tradition as sophisticated as that within which the Norito were recorded in writing. In Western Japanological discourse, the repetitively structured language termed rhetoric in this study has been openly viewed as detrimental to the Norito's literary worth (Sansom 1931, Philippi 1959, 1990); most likely as a result of the problematic status of rhetoric and repetition in Western modernity. This - coupled with disciplinary divisions in Japan - has resulted in the Norito becoming divorced from the mainstream corpus of Old Japanese literature, despite their close relationship to that corpus and despite their high degree of rhetorical sophistication. After addressing some of the reasons for the Norito's alienation in discourse on Japanese literature, and exploring some theoretical dimensions of rhetoric itself, this study proceeds to set the liturgies in the context of Old Japanese oral and textual cultures and to begin to introduce features of their rhetoric - noting that the interrelatedness of rhetorical structures is a major key to understanding them. The last three chapters of the study are concerned with rhyme, a special feature that is both an analogue of, and interconnected with, other rhetorical structures. Together, the three chapters argue that rhyme is an understudied but pervasive feature of Japanese poetry and song and that - in the Old Japanese case - rhyming structures constitute a significant component of the rhetoric of the Norito and other texts. The development of a robust analytical approach to rhetorical features of Old Japanese texts has been hampered by the persistent reluctance to associate Japanese literature with 'rhyme', or 韻 in - two terms with problematic heritages. In attempting to implement such an approach in the case of the Norito, it is hoped that this study will, in small measure, contribute to a better understanding of rhetorical texts in general and, above all, to the repositioning of the Norito within the mainstream corpus of Old Japanese literature, where they belong.

abstract: This thesis investigates similarities in the diachronic sound changes found in Eastern Old Japanese dialects and in Ryukyuan languages and tests a hypothesis of language contact. I examine three sound changes attested in the Eastern Old Japanese corpus of Kupchik (2011). These three are denasalization of prenasalized obstruents, the fortition of the labial glide [w] and prenasalized / simple voiced fricative [(n)z], and the irregular raising of Eastern Old Japanese mid vowels. Extralinguistic and linguistic evidence is presented in support of a hypothesis for language contact between 8th century Ryukyuan speakers and Eastern Old Japanese speakers. At present, many assumptions bog down any potential evidence of contact. However, cases where reconstructed Ryukyuan could have donated a form into EOJ do exist. With future research into early Ryukyuan development and the lexicons, phonologies, and syntactic patterns of Ryukyuan languages, more can be said about this hypothesis. Alongside testing a hypothesis of language contact, this thesis can also be viewed as an analysis of Eastern Old Japanese spelling variation of the three changes mentioned above. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2015

This thesis analyses the nine main tense–aspect constructions in Old Japanese in more detail than ever before, exploiting the research possibilities created by the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese. The commitment to close textual reading and the interpretation of examples in context that is characteristic of traditional Japanese scholarship is combined with a determination to explain the distributional data revealed by the Corpus. Large samples are used to produce quantitative semantic analyses, allowing a new perspective on multifunctional constructions from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. All findings are placed within the wider perspective of cross-linguistic studies of tense and aspect, an approach often missing in Old Japanese scholarship. This thesis is the most comprehensive analysis of Old Japanese tense and aspect to date. Some traditional conclusions are challenged, and light is shed on many previously unexplained phenomena. Resultative constructions are discovered to be even more pervasive in Japanese than previously thought, with at least five of the nine con-structions I look at hypothesized to have begun as resultative constructions. In most cases these constructions have broadened to also denote ongoing activities, another characteristic of Japanese. This thesis thereby contributes to the cross-linguistic understanding of resultative constructions, and to the question of the validity and nature of the distinction between activities and states. It also shows the potential of an exemplar-based model of linguistic storage, which is seen to be a powerful tool for explaining both the multifunctionality of grammatical constructions and semantic change.

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科学研究費補助金 研究種目:基盤研究(C) 課題番号:16520276 研究代表者:釘貫 亨 研究期間:2004-2007年度