A Functional Grammar of Predication in Classical Japanese. (Volumes I--Iii).

要旨

Like other structuralist grammars, the traditional codification developed for classical Japanese limits the scope of its analysis to the sentence, and does not lend itself very well to the study of text, or language-in-use. Western analyses of this language are also sentence-oriented, and similarly ill suited to such a task. In order to describe the grammatical side of how a Heian or Nara period text coheres, or induces interpretation as an integrated whole, traditional categories must either be redefined or replaced by more flexible perspectives, which take the dynamic nature of discourse into account. This dissertation takes the predicate in classical Japanese as the minimal grammatical device for the linquistic staging of experience. It correlates the structural parameters of predication--lexical, derivational, inflectional and syntactic--on a single continuum, by explaining these structures as analogues of certain rhetorical "moves" made in the creation of text, or discourse. A number of traditional categories are functionally reinterpreted, while others are replaced. Language is viewed as discursive activity, and grammar as a precipitate or distillate of this activity over time. The metaphorical provenance of several syntactic and morphological devices is examined, and both the stable and the slippery sides of grammatical meaning are shown to follow from a text's simultaneously relating to different contexts: interpersonal, ideational and textual. Derivational operators (jodooshi) and inflections (katsuyoo-kei) are explained as grammatical reflexes of the act of relating to such contexts. The classical predicate is interpreted as an iconically structured composite of interpersonal, propositional and textual meaning, in which the layering of different operators mimics the structure of the speech act. Elsewhere, the figure of kakari-musubi is explained as a device for shifting the focus of a message forward, to its Theme. The clause is explained as a text in microcosm, a device evolved in the discursive practice of presenting new information against a background of the known. A better underst and ing of how information is structured as text in this language should make us more perceptive readers of the literary works of Nara and Heian Japan.

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