A Functional Approach To -aku Nominalization In Old Japanese Discourse Account

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Published In

Buckeye East Asian Linguistics

Abstract

The suffix -aku was a productive predicate nominalizer in Old Japanese but has lost productivity by Early Middle Japanese and is now limited to a generally unparsed segment of fewer than fifteen lexemes found in dictionaries today. While some studies have included investigations of the structure and semantics of the morpheme -aku at the lexical or sentential level, particularly in poetry, this study takes the discourse context into consideration in its investigation of the functions of -aku nominalization. In examining the functions of -aku nominalization throughout all genres of extant Old Japanese texts, it finds that these nominalizations were strongly tied to epistemic modality and most often used by speakers to create discourse referents for evaluation, particularly in highly emotive contexts.

Keywords

Nominalization, Old Japanese, discourse

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