2025/01/01 by Köhlich, Viktor
Arts and Humanities · #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #Linguistic research and analysis #Lexicography and Language Studies
paper · doi:10.17605/osf.io/65a2s
This paper was published in Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 43, pp. 179–208, https://www.iudicium.de/katalog/86205-185.htm This paper discusses the group of so-called rentaishi, a morphologically diverse and syntactically defective group of nominal modifiers in Japanese. Rentaishi will be dis- cussed both from a diachronic and from a synchronic point of view, embedding each discussion in a cross-linguistic context. It will be argued that the establishment of rentaishi as a part-of-speech category resulted from a greater awareness of the differences between Japanese and Western languages, especially in the adjectival domain. At the beginning of the twentieth century, rentaishi came to be regarded as the equivalent of the prototypically attributive but also highly restricted Western adjectives. From a synchronic point of view it will be investigated whether the category rentaishi, which underwent a gradual margin- alization in the second half of the twentieth century, could be (re-)incorporated into the Japanese adjectival category. This seems justified, as relevant lexemes have strong parallels to cross-linguistic groups of attributive-only and restricted modifiers, such as non-inter- sective or relational adjectives. Finally, the non-predicative character of rentaishi will be related to the cross-linguistic debate on direct and indirect modification in Japanese. As attributive-only modifiers they are perfect candidates for direct modifiers in the sense of Cinque (2010), and it will be shown how the inclusion of this group into the ongoing debate can yield new insights relevant to Japanese and general linguistics.