Yasuhiro Kondo, Nouns expressing time in Japanese from the Heian Era--Proposal for and classification of "temporal nouns"--
Nouns expressing time in Japanese from the Heian Era--Proposal for and classification of "temporal nouns"--
Yasuhiro Kondo
KokugotoKokubungaku, Vol.93-5, 2016
1. Introduction
In Heian Era Japanese, there are also nouns used in an adverbial way as is the case with nouns such as "past", "now," and "between" in modern Japanese. Most of these are nouns that express time or place, and, among these, this usage is particularly characteristic of nouns expressing time. Therefore, in this paper, we refer to nouns expressing time as "temporal nouns" and nouns expressing place as "spatial nouns". Below, we touch on differences between the two, and mainly discuss temporal nouns. Although it may be possible to use the expression "time nouns", the term "temporal nouns" has spread somewhat and, as touched on in (1) and later, this relates to both "tense" (time) and "aspect" (phase), so we refer to them as "temporal".
Further, in order to survey the features of this type of noun, we need to investigate all cases in which it occurs in the reference, and clarify the reciprocal precedents. Additionally, to investigate this, the work of listing the connectives of "all word attributives + adverbial nouns," and classifying the linking patterns before and after them is often required. It is necessary to investigate the number of verb and adjective types and noun types, and this is a significant endeavor. In addition to this, there are many ancillary connectives that need to be surveyed, such as "adverbial noun + various case-marking particles," and this is an extremely difficult task to complete manually. The classical language "corpus" is extremely useful at such a time. In this paper, we collect materials using the "Japanese Language History Corpus Heian Era Edition," which was developed and published by the National Language Research Institute.
