Grammaticalization of Japanese verbals: Pragmatic Persistence and Syntactic Decategorialization

This paper is an attempt to ascertain the level of pragmatic persistence and syntactic decategorialization observed in the grammaticalization of 18 Japanese lexical verbs and adjectives into auxiliaries. As a result, the following are ascertained: (1) Pragmatic constraints observed in the use of the lexical forms persist into the grammatical forms. (2) Syntactic decategorialization is observed in terms of loss of the following properties: (a) the freedom to appear independently in a sentence, (b) the ability to select a subject, (c) transitive or intransitive identity, and (d) independent valency. However, the behaviour of te morau/itadaku and te hosii suggests that these grammatical forms retain the ability to select a subject and some transitive-like feature.