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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. 147–175

Chapter 6
The final-appendage construction in Japanese and Korean

To what extent is post-predicative position exploited in the two East Asian languages?

| Fuji Women’s University
| Hokkaido University of Education
| Georgia Institute of Technology

Japanese and Korean are both predicate-final (OV) languages with relatively flexible constituent order. However, our analysis of parallel texts (Japanese novels and their Korean translations) demonstrates that the two languages differ in the exploitability of post-predicative position. Korean has a much lower frequency of final-appendage structures with clause-internal elements (especially adnominals and subject nominals) less likely to occur in post-predicative position. On the other hand, Korean shows a relatively higher proportion of vocative phrases in post-predicative position despite a lower frequency of final-appendage structures. The results reveal that Japanese exhibits a relatively higher degree of constructional entrenchment of final-appendage structures. In contrast, post-predicative position in Korean is rather restrictive, more limited to clause-external elements than to clause-internal ones.

Keywords: final-appendage construction, postposing, post-predicative position, Japanese, Korean
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Japanese final-appendage structures and their Korean translations
    • 3.2Korean translations of Japanese utterances with the final-appendage construction
    • 3.3Distribution by grammatical function
  • 4.Post-predicative differences in form and frequency
    • 4.1Adnominals
    • 4.2Nominals
    • 4.3Particle-less pronouns
    • 4.4Vocative phrases
    • 4.5Summary: Post-predicative position in Korean
  • 5.Constructional entrenchment of final-appendage structures
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgements
  • Keys to abbreviations
  • References
  • Data sources
Published online: 13 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.232.06izu
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