Dr Kerri Russell

Using data from the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese, we examine null pronouns in Old Japanese, focusing on their distribution in Provisional, Conditional, and Concessive clauses. We demonstrate that the three clause types are subordinated within their larger syntactic context. Next, we investigate the ratios of occurrence of null pronouns in these clauses. We show that Provisional clauses are less likely to contain null pronouns than Conditional and Concessive clauses, and note other differences between the three clause types. We consider which aspects of clause-internal and -external properties might be responsible for these differences and reject the notion that Old Japanese has a grammaticized switch-reference system involving these inflections.

Th is paper introduces the collaborative corpus-based research project Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese. As part of the project, we are developing a corpus of pre-modern Japanese texts which is encoded with grammatical, and in particular syntactic, information and we here present two pilot studies based on the corpus, concerning verb-verb (V1-V2) compounds in Old Japanese (8th century). We fi rst focus on V2s, with a view to understanding what properties are characteristic of the loosely defi ned class of ‘auxiliary verbs’ (hojodōshi 補助動詞). We apply a number of tests to compounds, including for lexical integrity and transitivity harmony, and thereby identify a number of V2s that can take part in ‘non-lexical compounds’ (compounds relatively unconstrained by the semantics of their component verbs), as well as some distributional and combinatory patterns typical of non-lexical compounds. Second, we examine a single high-frequency verb, omop- ‘think, feel’, in order to examine its argument-taking properties when used as a predicate alone and when used as a V1 in a compound. We identify interesting diff erences, in particular fi nding that omop-V2 compounds are less likely to take clausal complements than when omop- is used as a predicate on its own.