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New Trends in Grammaticalization and Language Change
Edited by Sylvie Hancil, Tine Breban and José Vicente Lozano
[Studies in Language Companion Series 202] 2018
► pp. 333–360

From the inside to the outside of the sentence

Forming a larger discourse unit with jijitsu ‘fact’ in Japanese

| Meiji University

This study examines the development of the projector jijitsu ‘the fact is, in fact’ from the earlier nominal predicate jijitsu-nari/dearu/da/desu/dearimasu (fact-copulative verb) in Modern through Present-day Japanese. Evidence from corpus studies suggests that jijitsu undergoes both formal and functional changes from the inside of the sentence as a nominal predicate to the outside of the sentence as a projector, connecting preceding and following information, forming a larger discourse unit. This change is characteristic of ‘constructionalization’ in the sense of Traugott and Trousdale (2013). The nominal predicate use of jijitsu inside the sentence also goes through several formal changes in the choice of copulative verbs over time, i.e. ‘constructional changes’. Constructionalization attested in the history of jijitsu echoes the historical processes of similar constructions in European languages, which means that language users have the potential to make ‘discourse-pragmatic’ sense of a given context, and such a newly emergent sense is likely to be formally realized at the edge of a sentence.

Keywords: constructionalization beyond the sentence, constructional changes, projectors, discourse and grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1A short history of jijitsu
    • 2.2Overview of research on jijitsu
      • 2.2.1A commentary inductive adverb at sentence-initial position
      • 2.2.2A kind of adverbial connector between sentences
      • 2.2.3Boundary between written and spoken languages
    • 2.3Interim summary
  • 3.Corpora
  • 4.Survey results
    • 4.1Modern Japanese periods
    • 4.2Present-day Japanese periods
  • 5.Summary and discussion
    • 5.1From the inside to the outside of the sentence for a larger discourse unit
    • 5.2Why constructionalization works
    • 5.3Local changes inside the sentence
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.202.14shi
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