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Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics
Edited by Irma Taavitsainen, Andreas H. Jucker and Jukka Tuominen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 243] 2014
► pp. 77–106

From degree/manner adverbs to pragmatic particles in Japanese

A corpus-based approach to the parallel diachronic development of amari, bakari, and yahari

| Georgia Institute of Technology

This is a corpus-based analysis of synchronic and diachronic variations of the Japanese degree adverbs amari ‘extremely’ and bakari ‘about, to the extent’, and the manner adverb yahari ‘being still’. These variations are unique in that they are not constructions, but morphophonological variants. Further, variants of the same phonetic shape undergo parallel development. First, phonologically, each adverb set involves both expansion and truncation. Positionally, the newer variants shifted from sentence-internal to sentence-peripheral, and they expanded functionally as discourse/pragmatic particles, thereby semantically becoming more (inter)subjective. Contrastingly, each original form preserves its original features most. Second, such parallelism is motivated by “associative iconicity” (Fischer 1999) and “paradigmatic iconicity” (Krug 2000). Third, given the layered structure analyses of Japanese, the changes are conceivably interrelated. Fourth, this article presents a similar case in Korean for a comparison.

Published online: 11 March 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.243.07shi
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Cited by 3 other publications

Shinzato, Rumiko
2017. Chapter 11. Grammaticalization of PMs/DMs/MMs in Japanese. In Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles [Studies in Language Companion Series, 186], ► pp. 305 ff. DOI logo
Shinzato, Rumiko
2018. Chapter 2. Amari/anmari/anma and totemo/tottemo in history and discourse. In Pragmatics of Japanese [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 285], ► pp. 49 ff. DOI logo
Tanno, Koji
2022. The role of discourse strategies in the grammaticalization of the Japanese discourse markerdakara. Language and Linguistics. 語言暨語言學 ► pp. 592 ff. DOI logo

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