Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese: a comprehensive study of the basic syntax of pre-modern Japanese.
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Oriental Institute
Abstract
Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese: a comprehensive study of the basic syntax of pre-modern Japanese.
This project will give a detailed account of the basic structure or grammar of the pre-modern Japanese language through its recorded history from the beginning of 8th until the beginning of the 17th century. The group of scholars on the project is the strongest team ever to work together on pre-modern Japanese language and significant results of relevance to Japanese studies in general, Japanese linguistics, and historical and general linguistic theory are anticipated.
Most research into historical Japanese grammar, including syntax, implicitly assumes the grammatical categories of the modern language and projects them onto earlier stages of the language. This project, by contrast, will investigate pre-modern Japanese on its own merit, providing an immanent, comprehensive account of each of the earlier stages. The project will also give a description of the changes that have taken place between these stages of the language and contribute significantly to an understanding of how the grammar of Japanese has changed through time.
Our theoretical focus is on 'argument realization', which is a fundamentally important aspect of the syntax of a language which concerns the way in which verb meaning determines the number of arguments and their morpho-syntactic and semantic properties. This will be investigated in detail through large text corpora, focusing on the following three distinct and well-attested periods of the Japanese language.
Old Japanese (mainly 700 - 800)
Early Middle Japanese (800-1200, but especially 900 - 1100)
Early Modern Japanese (c. 1600)
The descriptive and analytical work of the project is based on extensive text corpora from these three periods. The first step in the project is the construction of a large database (for internal use only) which organizes the empirical material for analysis: the texts will first be transcribed and entered into an electronic database and then 'tagged' to show the grammatical role of nouns in the sentences; finally all verbs will be extracted and recorded together with information about the grammatical roles with which they occur, thereby creating an electronic concordance with information about each verb and the grammatical frame in which it can occur.
This database makes possible a comprehensive and systematic analysis and description of verb meaning and associated grammatical frames in each of the stages of Japanese, determining what part of verb meaning contributes most importantly to its grammatical potential and how this potential is realized in sentences. The project will give a detailed analysis of relevant verb classes and of differences and similarities between and across verb classes.
Based on this analysis it will further be possible to chart changes for individual verbs and classes of verbs and to establish possible 'developmental pathways' through time for verb meaning and grammatical frames.
A detailed investigation of this kind within this theoretical approach has never been carried out for any language. The results of the investigation will first of all bear on the description and understanding of pre-modern Japanese and its changes through time, with implications for interpretation of texts. The study will also have a number of implications for linguistic theory, both with regards to frameworks for understanding verb semantics and clause structure, and with regards to the application of grammatical theory to 'dead' languages.
This project will give a detailed account of the basic structure or grammar of the pre-modern Japanese language through its recorded history from the beginning of 8th until the beginning of the 17th century. The group of scholars on the project is the strongest team ever to work together on pre-modern Japanese language and significant results of relevance to Japanese studies in general, Japanese linguistics, and historical and general linguistic theory are anticipated.
Most research into historical Japanese grammar, including syntax, implicitly assumes the grammatical categories of the modern language and projects them onto earlier stages of the language. This project, by contrast, will investigate pre-modern Japanese on its own merit, providing an immanent, comprehensive account of each of the earlier stages. The project will also give a description of the changes that have taken place between these stages of the language and contribute significantly to an understanding of how the grammar of Japanese has changed through time.
Our theoretical focus is on 'argument realization', which is a fundamentally important aspect of the syntax of a language which concerns the way in which verb meaning determines the number of arguments and their morpho-syntactic and semantic properties. This will be investigated in detail through large text corpora, focusing on the following three distinct and well-attested periods of the Japanese language.
Old Japanese (mainly 700 - 800)
Early Middle Japanese (800-1200, but especially 900 - 1100)
Early Modern Japanese (c. 1600)
The descriptive and analytical work of the project is based on extensive text corpora from these three periods. The first step in the project is the construction of a large database (for internal use only) which organizes the empirical material for analysis: the texts will first be transcribed and entered into an electronic database and then 'tagged' to show the grammatical role of nouns in the sentences; finally all verbs will be extracted and recorded together with information about the grammatical roles with which they occur, thereby creating an electronic concordance with information about each verb and the grammatical frame in which it can occur.
This database makes possible a comprehensive and systematic analysis and description of verb meaning and associated grammatical frames in each of the stages of Japanese, determining what part of verb meaning contributes most importantly to its grammatical potential and how this potential is realized in sentences. The project will give a detailed analysis of relevant verb classes and of differences and similarities between and across verb classes.
Based on this analysis it will further be possible to chart changes for individual verbs and classes of verbs and to establish possible 'developmental pathways' through time for verb meaning and grammatical frames.
A detailed investigation of this kind within this theoretical approach has never been carried out for any language. The results of the investigation will first of all bear on the description and understanding of pre-modern Japanese and its changes through time, with implications for interpretation of texts. The study will also have a number of implications for linguistic theory, both with regards to frameworks for understanding verb semantics and clause structure, and with regards to the application of grammatical theory to 'dead' languages.
Publications
Frellesvig B
(2018)
The Diachronic Typology of Differential Argument Marking
Frellesvig B
The Cambridge Handbook of Japanese Linguistics
Frellesvig B
(2016)
Transitivity and Valency Alternations - Studies on Japanese and Beyond
Frellesvig B
Verb Verb Complexes in Asian Languages
Frellesvig B
(2015)
????????????? Text Corpora and Japanese Historical Linguistics
Frellesvig B
(2017)
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics article
Frellesvig, B
(2018)
The Cambridge Handbook of Japanese Linguistics
Frellesvig, B
(2019)
Verb Verb Complexes in Asian Languages
Frellesvig, B
(2019)
Perspectives on language structure and language change
| Description | The research has resulted in (a) The development of a major resource, the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese (OCOJ), which is unparalleled in making access to and knowledge about Old Japanese available to academics and interested members of the public. The OCOJ is used widely by scholars working on pre-modern Japanese throughout the world. It is in some regards setting the standard for development of other diachronic corpora of Japanese. (b) The published research (of which more will continue to appear as results of the research done during the grant period) has advanced considerably in important respects knowledge of the grammar and syntax of the Old Japanese language. |
| Exploitation Route | The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese will remain a or the major resource for use by scholars of Old Japanese (see also http://vsarpj.orinst.ox.ac.uk/corpus/). The published research on Old Japanese syntax will be a point of departure for further research in the international scholarly community. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education |
| URL | http://vsarpj.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ |
| Description | Our findings have mainly been used by academics in pursuit of research on the grammar of pre-modern Japanese, but we are also expecting an effect on education within Japanese Studies. The engagement activity ('OJ in Action') entered below is an example of non-academic impact. Generally, the resource developed in the course of the research (The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese) will continue to have non-academic impact in the sense of opening up some otherwise inaccesible material of high general cultural interest to the general public. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2009 |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Description | AHRC NIHU Scholarship (Kerri Russell) |
| Amount | £3,800 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | NIHU17 |
| Organisation | Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 03/2011 |
| End | 05/2011 |
| Description | AHRC NIHU Scholarship (Stephen Horn) |
| Amount | £3,800 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 11/2010 |
| End | 01/2011 |
| Description | British Academy ARP (Academy Research Projects) New Call 2012 |
| Amount | £24,275 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | British Academy reference: AN120001 |
| Organisation | The British Academy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 05/2012 |
| Title | Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese |
| Description | The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese (abbreviated OCOJ) is a comprehensive annotated digital corpus of all extant texts in Japanese from the Old Japanese period (mainly 8th century AD). It can be searched in various ways through the online interface provided at the URL below. In addition to this freely available public interface, more detailed customized searches can be programmed here in Oxford; we have made extensive use of such detailed customized searches in the work of the research group and have also provided a large number of such searches for external research partners using the database. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2011 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese constitutes a research and reference resource for scholars and students of early Japan (as well as access for the general public to the texts). It has been used extensively by this research group to provide the data sets on which all research articles published by the group are based. It is also increasingly being used by other research groups, mainly in Japan, including those listed under 'Partnerships and Colaborations' in this submission. It is also being used by individual scholars. |
| URL | http://vsarpj.orinst.ox.ac.uk/corpus/ |
| Title | Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese |
| Description | This database constitutes a complete reworking of the data in the OCOJ and full publication of both data and sophisticated interfaces. The database will be published in late March 2018. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The publication of this database will have impact on the study and understanding of the Old Japanese language and culture. |
| URL | http://oncoj.ninjal.ac.jp/ |
| Description | A Diachronic Contrastive Study of Japanese Interrogatives |
| Organisation | National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) |
| Country | Japan |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Kerri Russell is a member of this project investigating the use of interrogatives throughout the history of the Japanese language. For this project she has extracted data from the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese showing the use of interrogatives and their syntactic context. |
| Collaborator Contribution | This project is led by Satoshi Kinsui, an external member of the project "Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese", who has made a number of contributions to the development of the corpus. |
| Impact | Publication by Satoshi Kinsui using data from the OCOJ. Future publications are expected. |
| Start Year | 2013 |
| Description | HiCor Network |
| Organisation | University of Oxford |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Sharing resources and markup strategies with other researchers working on historical texts. We have given two presentations to this network. |
| Collaborator Contribution | TORCH is a University of Oxford initiative that seeks to stimulate and support interdisciplinary research. |
| Impact | The goal of the HiCor network is to establish a work group of corpus linguists, computational linguists, and historians aiming at studying how annotated corpora can be built from historical documents, and used to mine historical texts and investigate cognitive phenomena. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | NINJAL Diachronic Corpus project |
| Organisation | National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) |
| Country | Japan |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese is a corpus of the oldest stage of the Japanese language (8th century). We share our data and technology with NINJAL, allowing researchers based at NINJAL access to our materials. |
| Collaborator Contribution | NINJAL has an ongoing project to create a corpus of pre-modern Japanese starting around the 10th century through 16th century. NINJAL shares their material with us, making it possible for us to conduct diachronic studies of the earliest stages of the Japanese language. All members of the research team based in Oxford have spent time at NINJAL to conduct research. |
| Impact | We held 3 workshops, which were all attended by members of the research teams from Oxford and NINJAL (held in Osaka University 2011; NINJAL 2012; NINJAL 2014). We also co-organized an all-day event open to members of the public (31 July 2012), where members of both teams presented demonstrations of our corpora and also research based on our corpora. There have been several publications relating to this collaboration, including: Frellesvig, Bjarke. (expected 2015). "Why romanize a corpus of (Old) Japanese?" in????????????? Corpus-Based Historical Studies in Japanese. ????? Hituzi Syobo Publishing , Tokyo.; Horn, Stephen Wright and Kerri L Russell. (expected 2015) "The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese." in????????????? Corpus-Based Historical Studies in Japanese. ????? Hituzi Syobo Publishing , Tokyo.; and 5 articles in 2012. ????????????? Corpus based studies of Japanese language history. Tokyo: NINJAL. |
| Start Year | 2009 |
| Description | Senmyo Project |
| Organisation | University of Tsukuba |
| Country | Japan |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Digitization and annotation including syntactic tagging of "Senmyo" (Imperial Edicts). |
| Collaborator Contribution | Paid for tagging by one researcher, two graduate students, and for a programmer. |
| Impact | The tagged Senmyo is now included in the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese, and can be searched alongside the other texts. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Study of the History of the Japanese Language Using Statistics and Machine-Learning |
| Organisation | National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) |
| Country | Japan |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Stephen Horn has been a member of this project using the syntactic markup in the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese to find ways of automating markup of syntactic structures to the pre-Modern Japanese corpus under development at NINJAL. |
| Collaborator Contribution | NINJAL has shared their resources with us, and funded research trips to Japan. |
| Impact | This project has led to further annotations of the pre-modern corpora of Japanese hosted at NINJAL. |
| Start Year | 2011 |
| Description | The Japanese Lexicon: A Rendaku Encyclopedia |
| Organisation | National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) |
| Country | Japan |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Kerri Russell is a member of this project which investigates sound changes occurring in compounds in Japanese. She has assisted with data collection and analysis using the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese. |
| Collaborator Contribution | They have funded a research trip and helped with adding entries to the dictionary being created alongside the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese. |
| Impact | Kerri Russell will be listed as a co-author on a future version of the Rendaku database (http://www-h.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~irwin/site/Rendaku_Database.html). |
| Start Year | 2013 |
| Description | School Visit (Oxford Spires): Old Japanese in Action |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | The event (Old Japanese in Action) was organized in collaboration with Creation Theatre and Oxford Spires Academy (a state funded secondary school in East Oxford); it took place at Oxford Spires Academy on 13 June 2014. This event was designed to introduce, in an engaging and interactive way, Year 8-10 pupils to some of the oldest Japanese literature, history and culture, from the 8th century AD, the Nara period; in linguistic terms the language of this period is known as Old Japanese, hence the name Old Japanese in Action. A number of texts, including epic poetry, folk tales in poetic form, imperial edicts, and rituals, were selected to introduce students to the range of literature available at that time The school children who attended the event expressed enthusiasm, and in particular heightened awarenes of and interest in Japan and Japanese, as well as in older literature. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://vsarpj.orinst.ox.ac.uk/OJinAction/ |