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Part of
Different Slants on Grammaticalization
Edited by Sylvie Hancil and Vittorio Tantucci
[Studies in Language Companion Series 232] 2023
► pp. 20–49

Chapter 1
From comparative standard marker to comparative adverb

On the contact-induced (de)grammaticalization of yori in modern through present-day Japanese

| Meiji University

This study investigates the grammaticalization of the Japanese ablative marker yori ‘from’ into a comparative standard marker ‘than’ and further into a comparative adverb yori ‘more.’ It is widely known that ablative markers can be grammaticalized into comparative standard markers. However, little is known about the direction of change from comparative marker to comparative adverb. This study takes a corpus-based approach to uncover the process of change. The ablative yori, which had been used since Old Japanese, began to take on the adverbial property ‘more’ in the early twentieth century. While some collocational sequences facilitate the grammaticalization of yori, the overall degree of change turns out to be very slow.

Keywords: ablative markers, comparative standard markers, comparative adverbs, extravagance, language contact in Japanese, (de)grammaticalization, debonding, persistence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A short history of yori
  • 3.Preceding studies on yori and language contact
    • 3.1Preceding studies on yori
      • 3.1.1Hida (1992, 2019)
      • 3.1.2Morioka (1999)
    • 3.2Language contact research on Japanese
  • 4.Corpora
  • 5.Survey results and discussion
    • 5.1Gradualness of grammaticalization
    • 5.2Collocational sequences that preserve the earlier ablative function of yori
      • 5.2.1Yori-collocations with particles
      • 5.2.2Yori co-occurring with sarani ‘moreover’
    • 5.3A collocational sequence that reflects the newer adverbial function of yori
    • 5.4Language contact and ‘extravagance’
    • 5.5Degrammaticalization and the emergence of the comparative adverb yori
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
  • Glossing conventions
  • Division of the history of Japanese in this study
  • Dictionaries
  • Corpora
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 13 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.232.01shi
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