Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale

Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
Journal issue | 59 | 2023
Research Article | Morphosyntactic Changes and Sociolinguistic Variation in the Language of Kyōgen

Morphosyntactic Changes and Sociolinguistic Variation in the Language of Kyōgen

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Toraakirabon (1642)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse morphosyntactic structures in the language of kyōgen – a traditional form of Japanese comic theatre developed in the fourteenth century – from a sociolinguistic perspective, i.e. by highlighting differences in usage across various categories of characters, using the Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ). This paper will focus on the use of the particles ga and no with nominative and attributive functions and on the decline of kakari-musubi with koso in Toraakirabon (1642). The analysis will reveal that linguistic characterization is rendered not only through the lexicon, but also, as in the case of female characters, through a particular use of morphosyntactic structures, which appears less influenced by linguistic innovations.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: Feb. 27, 2023 | Accepted: June 13, 2023 | Published Aug. 29, 2023 | Language: en

Keywords Kyōgen • Japanese case particles • Late Middle Japanese • Gendered language • Sociolinguistic variation • Kakari-musubi • Toraakirabon

Copyright © 2023 Giuseppe Pappalardo. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2023/01/022


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