Finally, although it is not a word formation process widely used in Japanese, we take up the phenomenon of creating argot through switching the positions of mora within a word, in a way similar to the inversion type of “verlan” in French such asgarette-ci fromcigarette. There are some examples that have become somewhat established, such as neta‘material’from tane ‘seed’, syoba‘space, location’ from basyo‘location’andgasa‘execution of a search warrant by the police’fromsaga(su)
‘search’, but many, like maiuu ‘delicious’ from umai ‘delicious’ in the performing world oryanopii‘piano’frompiano‘piano’among jazz musicians (cf. Tateishi 1989), are jargon limited in use to a certain realm or by certain (often anti-social) groups.
4 Summary and future research perspectives
This chapter introduced basic concepts in the Japanese lexicon, presenting an over- view of the four kinds of vocabulary strata: Native (wago), Sino-Japanese (kango), Foreign, and Mimetics and of the characteristics of word formation processes like compounding, derivation, conversion, and reduplication and showing that the four types of strata do not participate equally in all word formation processes. As a con- clusion to this chapter we will briefly consider how the relation between vocabulary strata and word formation processes should be captured. The mutual relation between vocabulary strata and word formation processes is an important issue that has not been comprehensively considered from the view of the Japanese lexicon as
a whole. Consideration of this issue will add theoretical support from a modern Japanese synchronic viewpoint to the concept of vocabulary strata that has been treated as a historical product in traditional JapaneseKokugogakustudies.
In spite of not knowing the historical origin of individual lexical items, a native speaker, without regard to age or dialect background, consciously or unconsciously apprehends the differences among the vocabulary strata. Vocabulary strata, then, can be thought to be part of the lexical information inherently present in the mental lexicon. So, how can we integrate the concept of vocabulary strata into a synchronic grammar of Japanese. An intriguing solution to this question is proposed in Itô and Mester (1999). However, their proposal is limited in the sense that it holds that the target of the rules and constraints of lexical phonology that are involved in word formation is the“phonological lexicon”. Their proposal is that the four vocabulary strata do not exist independent of each other but form a hierarchical structure as shown in (30).
(30)
In this conception of the lexicon, different strata are conceived of as forming a gradual and hierarchical stratification characterized by “different degrees of nativization”, which are formally represented as a“hierarchy of foreignness, with exceptions to one rule always being exceptions to another rule, but not vice versa” (Itô and Mester 1999: 64). Thus, a particular phonological rule or constraint specifi- cally motivated by the native stratum fails to apply to the three other strata shown in the positions higher in the hierarchy; likewise, a particular phonological rule or constraint that is sensitive to native words and established loans does not apply to the two other classes of assimilated and unassimilated foreign words, for example.
An important feature of this model defined by the set inclusion relations of con- straint applicability is that the individual constraint domains are primary whereas the stratal structure that emerges from them is only a secondary generalization (Itô and Mester 1999: 70). In other words, the existence of different lexical strata is deemed an epi-phenomenon that follows from the more-or-less systematic clustering of domains that are defined over the applicability of particular rules or constraints.
Vocabulary strata and word formation processes 45
Attractive as it is, Itô and Mester’s core/periphery model could not be upheld as such if we attempt to incorporate into it the morphological properties and word formation processes stated in this chapter as constraint domains. First, as seen in Section 2, onlywagohave the full set of lexical and functional categories; the other strata have missing categories. Next, word formation processes like compounding, derivation, conversion, and reduplication differ in whether they apply or not de- pending on the strata. Table 8 shows whether or not each lexical stratum includes each type of lexical information or not.
Table 8:Variant applicability of lexical rules
R1 R2 R3 R4 R5 R6 R7 R8 R9 R10 R11
native + + + + + – + + + + +
S-J + + + – – + + + + + +
foreign + + + – – – + + + limited –
mimetic limited + + – limited – – + + – +
R1 = Noun, R2 = VN, R3 = AN, R4 = inflected V, R5 = A, R6 = infinite iteration of compounding, R7 = compound head, R8 = compound modifier, R9 = prefix, R10 = suffix, R11 = reduplication
Taking whether or not a word formation rule is applicable as a parameter and marking each parameter as“+”or“–”, it is clear that Table 8 does not show a tidy distribution with the unidirectional changes that would be expected from the set inclusion relations of (30). Native words have most properties, but lack at least one– R6. Lexical items considered Sino-Japanese words share many properties with native words, but there are also properties in which they do not participate. What have been considered four independent classes in the past do not each form a single coherent class, but can instead be regarded as forming a gradient along which a word may have a higher or lower affiliation to a given stratum, depending on the greater or lesser number of properties with which it is provided. That is, the four strata do not each constitute a monolithic block; instead, lexical items that have traditionally been considered to belong to the same vocabulary stratum change their membership in the given stratum depending on whether or not each parameter is applicable. Without regard to their historical origin, lexical items in modern Japanese that share a number of lexical characteristics form a single class with the characteristics they share. For example, as seen in the variation in the affixation of the beautific prefix o-/go-, a single lexical item, e.g. tya‘tea’, may have multiple membership, being Sino-Japanese by some standards and native by some other standards.
Thus, when determining vocabulary stratum membership, a lexical item has certain properties, such as the presence or absence of various categories, whether or not certain word formation rules are applicable, or whether or not some lexical phonological constraint applies as criteria and depending on which of many given
standards apply, a degree of membership–a degree of “nativeness”or a degree of
“Sino-Japaneseness” –is established incrementally. The greater the degree to which standards characteristic of native words apply, the greater the degree of“nativeness”; the greater the degree to which standards characteristic of mimetics apply, the greater the degree of“mimeticness”. Consulting Table 8, except for infinite iteration of com- pounding, native words have all the properties listed. In this sense, the differences among vocabulary strata can be captured as a difference in the degree of nativiza- tion to Japanese, as Itô and Mester (1999) claimed. One important topic for future research may be to determine the properties of vocabulary strata from a synchronic viewpoint throughfinding the links between various word formation processes and lexical information.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank John Haig for translating this chapter from Japanese. Yamazaki Makoto (NINJAL) contributed to the tabulation of the 1994 survey in Table 5. Part of this work derives from the collaborative research project “Syntactic, Semantic, and Morphological Characteristics of the Japanese Lexicon” (Project leader: Taro Kageyama, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 2010–2015).
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Hideki Kishimoto and Satoshi Uehara
2 Lexical categories
1 Introduction
Lexical items play different grammatical roles depending on the categories they belong to. Along with the distinction of the vocabulary strata – Native Japanese (NS), Sino-Japanese (SJ), Foreign (F), and Mimetic (M)–the proper classification of lexical categories (word classes) is essential to discovering any grammatical rules and principles in Japanese grammar. In the domestic grammatical tradition, consid- eration of word classes has a long history starting as early as in the late 1600s, and TŌJŌ Gimon (東条義門, 1786–1843) is generally credited with establishing the fundamental bipartition of word classes into yōgen (inflecting class) and taigen (non-inflecting class) that persists today. This bipartition is based on the morpholog- ical criterion of the presence or absence of inflectional endings, withyōgen(inflect- ing class) comprising verbs and adjectives, andtaigen(non-inflecting class) nouns.
Such a polar opposition, however, will be called into question if there are categories that fall in between the two poles. In fact, contemporary Japanese offers at least two categories that appear to be located between the two, namely Verbal Nouns (VN) and Adjectival Nouns (AN). The present chapter will survey the characteristics of Japanese lexical categories from generative and cognitive perspectives, with due attention to the proper treatment of VNs and ANs in the system of Japanese word classes.
School grammar (Japanese grammar taught at high schools) represents perhaps the most widely spread classification of Japanese lexical categories, which are divided into two major groups:jiritsugoor“independent categories”in Table 1 and fuzokugoor“dependent categories”in Table 2.
Table 1:Independent-form categories in school grammar
verb (dōshi) yomu‘read’ agaru‘climb’ kuru‘come’ suru‘do’
adjective (keiyōshi) utukusii‘beautiful’ kanasii‘sad’ yoi‘good’
adjectival noun (keiyōdōshi) sizuka da‘quiet’ kirei da‘pretty’ derikeeto da‘delicate’ barabara da‘separate’
noun (meishi) hito‘person’ anata‘you’ terebi‘TV’ wanwan‘doggie’ adverb
(fukushi) hakkiri‘clearly’ sukosi‘a little’
prenominal modifier (rentaishi)
arayuru‘every’ aru‘a certain’, ano‘that’ ookina‘big’
conjunction (setsuzokushi) sikasi‘but’ mata‘or’
interjection (kantōshi) hai‘yes’ aa‘oh’
Table 2:Dependent-form categories in school grammar
auxiliary (jodōshi) particle (joshi)
(s)ase‘causative’, -(r)are‘passive’, -nai/ nu
‘negative’, -(y)oo‘hortative’, -tai‘desiderative’, -masu‘polite’, -ta/ da‘past, perfect’, soo da
‘reportive’, -mai‘negative expectative’, yoo da
‘modality (uncertainty)’, -rasii‘modality (hearsay)’, -da/ desu‘copula’, etc.
1. case:ga(NOM),no(GEN),o(ACC),to(COM), kara(ABL)’, de (INST), etc.
2. conjunctive:keredo‘though’,ga‘but’,ba‘if’, node‘since’, etc.
3. adverbial:wa(TOP),mo‘also’,sae‘even’, sika‘only’, etc.
4. sentence-final:na(a)‘exclamatory’, zo‘emphatic’,yo‘assertive’, etc.
In regard to vocabulary strata, verbs and adjectives are confined to Native Japanese words. Nouns could be Native Japanese (kuruma ‘car’), Sino-Japanese (gakkoo
‘school’), foreign (terebi ‘TV’), or mimetic (wanwan ‘doggie’) (and verbal nouns, which are not included in the list of lexical categories in school grammar, come from all the lexical strata, as indokusyo(-suru) ‘reading (SJ)’, otetudai(-suru) ‘help (NJ)’, tesuto(-suru) ‘test (F)’, tekuteku(-suru) ‘walk (M)’). Adjectival nouns are also found in all the lexical strata, as insizuka da/na‘quiet (NJ)’,ganko da/na‘stubborn (SJ)’,derikeeto da/na‘delicate (F)’,barabara da/na‘separate (M)’.
The classifications in Tables 1 and 2 are far from definitive, and many different views are available in the literature; e.g. in modern Japanese linguistics (couched in the Western linguistic paradigms), verbal nouns are often seen as constituting a major lexical category, alongside verbs, nouns, adjectives, adjectival nouns (see Martin 1975; Shibatani 1990), but they are included in the category of nouns in traditional Japanese grammar. It is not an easy task to sort out Japanese lexical categories, because, in Japanese, inflection/conjugation is exhibited in limited cate- gories, and in many cases, no clear boundaries can be drawn between free and bound elements. Accordingly, a number of issues arise with regard to the question of how lexical categories are distinguished and how many categories should be recognized.
This chapter reviews a number of theoretical and descriptive issues on lexical categories. Section 2 briefly surveys the classification and terms of lexical categories discussed in traditional grammar. Section 3 provides a discussion from the genera- tive perspective, addressing the question of how “adjectival nouns” and “verbal nouns” –neither of whichfit into the classical cross-categorial feature system posit- ing only two features – can be defined. It is also shown that certain adjectivally- inflecting elements traditionally classified as dependent auxiliaries count as lexical adjectives, despite their morphological status. Section 4 examines the nature of Japanese lexical categories from the cognitive-typological perspective. The structural organization of the overall lexical categorization of the language and its major lexical categories (Noun, Verb, Adjective, Verbal Noun, and Adjectival Noun) are characterized in terms of cross-linguistic markedness patterns and their functional motivations are identified.