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Part of
Historical Linguistics 2013: Selected papers from the 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oslo, 5-9 August 2013
Edited by Dag T.T. Haug
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 334] 2015
► pp. 195–212

Differential Object Marking in Old Japanese

A corpus-based study

 | University of Oslo
 | University of Oxford
 | Tsukuba University
Within the past few decades, various proposals have been made about marking of objects in Old Japanese (e.g., Matsunaga 1983, Motohashi 1989, Yanagida 2006, Kuroda 2008, Yanagida & Whitman 2009, Wrona & Frellesvig 2010, Kinsui 2011, Miyagawa 2012), but there is still no consensus about the exact circumstances determining when direct objects are bare or accusative case marked in Old Japanese. We use the material in the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese to examine in detail the distribution of bare and accusative case marked objects in Old Japanese texts and show that Old Japanese had ‘differential object marking (DOM)’ associated with a specific/non-specific distinction (Yanagida & Whitman 2009). Thus, in Old Japanese, accusative case marked objects are specific, but bare objects are non-specific. This paper briefly discusses cases in which accusative case is dropped from specific objects.
Keywords: accusative case marking, corpus, differential object marking, D-linking, objects, Old Japanese, specificity
Published online: 1 October 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.334.11fre
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Aldridge, Edith & Yuko Yanagida
2021. Two types of alignment change in nominalizations. Diachronica 38:3 ► pp. 314 ff. DOI logo
Yanagida, Yuko
2018. Chapter 9. Differential argument marking and object movement in Old Japanese. In Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 250], ► pp. 181 ff. DOI logo

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