明治期における「誰も」の否定共起に関する一考察

要旨

The Japanese word daremo, composed of the interrogative dare and the topic marker mo, originally functioned as a subject , expressing the meaning of each person or everyone. This word daremo is said to co-occur with negative predicates in modern Japanese, but if we look at the way it was used in the Taisho era, it often co-occurred with positive predicates. However, in the case of positive predicates, it was mostly used in a specific pattern of the “well-known situation” type with the cognitive verb shiru. This paper clarifies the usage of daremo in the Meiji era, which was before the Taisho era, and explores why daremo tended to co-occur with negative predicates. Results show that, in addition to the structural pattern of the “well-known situation” type consisting of cognitive verbs, positive predicates were often used in the Meiji era in the pattern of the “general state or habit” type that was described by stative verbs and repetitive phases of action verbs. In other words, in the Taisho era, positive predicates only remained in an almost fixed pattern, but in the Meiji era, there were still variations of positive predicates. Reason for the gradual shift of daremo to a negative polarity item may be its progressive adverbialization. It is thought that daremo was used to indicate someone indefinite and that it was easy to express a generic meaning to indicate an unspecified general person. Daremo with genericity may have had low agentivity as a subject, gradually losing its subjectivity and becoming an adverb. In conjunction with this generic nature, predicates are often used to describe repetitive situations rather than individual specifics. In addition, there are many sentence structures in which daremo appears not in the subject position but just before the predicate, as in [topic daremo predicate], which may have promoted the adverbialization of daremo. As daremo became adverbialized, it began to co-occur with and emphasize the subject , as in hito wa daremo. After the Meiji era, when daremo expressed an indefinite term, it took a marked form such as daremoga to distinguish it from the adverbial daremo.

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