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This chapter describes the main features of Verb Verb complex predicates in Old and Middle Japanese (8th to 16th centuries) and discusses changes that took place between Old Japanese and Modern Japanese. Old Japanese had complex verbal predicate constructions which resemble the Modern Japanese Types 1–3, and in addition a V1 aktionsart verb construction, which is not found in later stages and which is hypothesized to have played a crucial role in the development of complex predicates in Japanese. The wordhood of complex verbal predicates is addressed. Verb Verb complex predicates did not constitute tight morphological units in Old and Early Middle Japanese, but developed into morphological words in Late Middle and Modern Japanese. It is proposed that the loss of subordinating function of the infinitive played an important part in this change. It is also observed that the Modern Japanese Type 4 (Vte V) is a Late Middle Japanese innovation which is not a prototypical complex predicate verb construction but rather an auxiliary verb construction.

Old and Middle Japanese are the pre-modern periods of the attested history of the Japanese language. Old Japanese (OJ) is largely the language of the 8th century, with a modest, but still significant number of written sources, most of which is poetry. Middle Japanese is divided into two distinct periods, Early Middle Japanese (EMJ, 800–1200) and Late Middle Japanese (LMJ, 1200–1600). EMJ saw most of the significant sound changes that took place in the language, as well as profound influence from Chinese, whereas most grammatical changes took place between the end of EMJ and the end of LMJ. By the end of LMJ, the Japanese language had reached a form that is not significantly different from present-day Japanese. OJ phonology was simple, both in terms of phoneme inventory and syllable structure, with a total of only 88 different syllables. In EMJ, the language became quantity sensitive, with the introduction of a long versus short syllables. OJ and EMJ had obligatory verb inflection for a number of modal and syntactic categories (including an important distinction between a conclusive and an (ad)nominalizing form), whereas the expression of aspect and tense was optional. Through late EMJ and LMJ this system changed completely to one without nominalizing inflection, but obligatory inflection for tense. The morphological pronominal system of OJ was lost in EMJ, which developed a range of lexical and lexically based terms of speaker and hearer reference. OJ had a two-way (speaker–nonspeaker) demonstrative system, which in EMJ was replaced by a three-way (proximal–mesial–distal) system. OJ had a system of differential object marking, based on specificity, as well as a word order rule that placed accusative marked objects before most subjects; both of these features were lost in EMJ. OJ and EMJ had genitive subject marking in subordinate clauses and in focused, interrogative and exclamative main clauses, but no case marking of subjects in declarative, optative, or imperative main clauses and no nominative marker. Through LMJ genitive subject marking was gradually circumscribed and a nominative case particle was acquired which could mark subjects in all types of clauses. OJ had a well-developed system of complex predicates, in which two verbs jointly formed the predicate of a single clause, which is the source of the LMJ and NJ (Modern Japanese) verb–verb compound complex predicates. OJ and EMJ also had mono-clausal focus constructions that functionally were similar to clefts in English; these constructions were lost in LMJ.

The Studies in Japanese and Korean Historical and Theoretical Linguistics and Beyond offers an excellent introduction to the state-of-art in the respective fields and currently ongoing debates in them.

This paper argues that a number of grammatical morphemes in Korean and Japanese are cognate and reflect two alternating copula roots: proto-Korean-Japanese *t- ∼ *n-. First, K ulo 'noun particle' and J to 'copula; particle' are compared; it is argued that they are root-related, exhibiting the sound correspondence K -l(-) :: J -t-; the functional similarity of J ni with K ulo and J to is also detailed (section 2). Second, the relation of to 2 to other OJ forms in t- (tu 'genitive', -te 'gerund', -te/tu 'perfective') and of ni to forms in n- (no 2, na 'genitive', no 2 'adverbializer', -na/ni/nu 'perfective') is examined; it is argued that these forms reflect two alternating copula roots pJ *t- ∼ *n- (section 3). Third, the relation of ulo and its variant ula to other forms within K (primarily the copula variants ilo-, ila(-)) is discussed; it is proposed that these forms reflect a pre-MK copula root *l- < pK *t-, also reflected in a number of MK forms in t- (section 4). Finally, it is proposed that a number of K forms in n- take part in an alternation n- ∼ {t- ∼ -l-} within K, suggesting a pKJ copula root alternation *t- ∼ *n-, reflected as K {t- ∼ -l-} ∼ n :: J t ∼ n.

In Japanese, nouns may be derived from verbs by means of the suffix -mono. 1 In Kyoto Japanese, this suffix exhibits interesting prosodic properties which hitherto have not been remarked upon in the literature: -mono derivatives form a systematic exception to the regularity whereby a complex word has the word tone of its initial constituent; this is preliminarily exemplified in (1) (in (1) and (2), phonetic high pitch is represented by boldface; see immediately below about the phonological interpretation): (1) kaimono ‘shopping’

In his 1963 paper “Morphemic Tone and Word Tone in Eastern Norwegian”, Jorgen Rischel discusses the lexical representation of morphemic tone and the relation between the tone of (isolated) words and the tone of their constituent morphemes. The overt emphasis is descriptive, but the issues he addresses are of importance to general theoretical linguistics, for they concern the very core of morphophonology in both its structural and generative aspect.

Bjarke Frellesvig describes the development of the Japanese language from its recorded beginnings until the present day as reflected by the written sources and historical record. Beginning with a description of the oldest attested stage of the language, Old Japanese (approximately the eighth century AD), and then tracing the changes which occurred through the Early Middle Japanese (800–1200), Late Middle Japanese (1200–1600) and the Modern Japanese (1600–onwards) periods, a complete internal history of the language is examined and discussed. This account provides a comprehensive study of how the Japanese language has developed and adapted, providing a much needed resource for scholars. A History of the Japanese Language is invaluable to all those interested in the Japanese language and also students of language change generally.

1. Acknowledgements 2. Introduction (by Frellesvig, Bjarke) 3. Abbreviations 4. Part I. Reconstructing the basic phoneme inventory 5. Evidence for seven vowels in proto-Japanese (by Frellesvig, Bjarke) 6. Early Japanese lexical strata and the allophones of /g/ (by Unger, J. Marshall) 7. Part II. Use of dialects in reconstruction 8. Proto-Japanese and the distribution of dialects (by Onishi, Takuichiro) 9. The uses of Ryukyuan in understanding Japanese language history (by Serafim, Leon A.) 10. Part III. Reconstructing accent 11. On the reconstruction of the proto-accentual system of Japanese (by Matsumori, Akiko) 12. A reconstruction of proto-Japanese accent for disyllabic nouns: Focusing on the problem of subclasses (by Shimabukuro, Moriyo) 13. Proto-Japanese beyond the accent system (by Vovin, Alexander) 14. Part IV. Reconstructing morphology and syntax 15. The source of the bigrade conjugation and stem shape in pre-Old Japanese (by Whitman, John) 16. On reconstruction of proto-Japanese and pre-Old Japanese verb inflection (by Frellesvig, Bjarke) 17. The Nominal and Adnominal forms in Old Japanese: Consequences for a reconstruction of pre-Old Japanese syntax (by Wrona, Janick) 18. References 19. Index

Vowel length has been reconstructed for pJ, based mainly on interpretinglow pitch in EMJ as reflecting pJ long vowels, supplemented with Ryukyuanevidence in the form of what seem to be primary long vowels. Vovin1993 offers additional external evidence. The precise role of this featurein changes between pJ and OJ is far from clear. Vowel length has beenproposed to have been a conditioning environment for certain soundchanges. For example, vowel raising only applying to short vowels (Hayata1998), or loss of *