助詞「なり」の成立 –不十分終止から並立・副助詞へ–

Abstract

The current research aims to explore Japanese Particle, ‘nari’; how it develops from the Incomplete S-ending Infl (henceafter, ISI) to a Coordinator, then to an Adverbial particle. ‘Nari’ used to be a copular auxiliary verb, but it has undergone functional and/or semantic shift. During the Mid-Japanese period, the original usage became a type of ISI. Over the late Edo period, the ISI went through a semantic and functional shift to something very close to ‘OR’, an alternative over many choices. In the current paper, it is argued that ‘nari’ attaches to Case particles, yielding the grammatical characteristic of a coordinator. At the turn of Meiji Period, ‘nari’ associates itself with conjunctors as well as predicates and adverbials. As a result, it has developed into a complete coordinator in the modern Japanese. Considering the developmental history of ‘nari’, it is known that the word appears more frequently as an independent word. Therefore, it achieves the lexical grammatical status of adverbial particle that signals ‘instances’/‘examples’. In terms of its conjunctive capability, usage, and applicability, ‘nari’ establishes fully as an adverbial particle. Incidently, several additional adverbial particles such as 「yara(やら)」「toka(とか)」 have appeared in the Modern Period of Japanese history. Because of these new development in the adverbial particles, it is found that ‘nari’ gets archaic over the lengthy period of time and exists only as a part of cliche or idiomatic expressions including 「nannari(なんなり)」. Or equivalently, the word ‘nari’ may be found only in some expressions showing the minuscule amount.