Chapter 4. Reanalysis and the emergence of adverbial connectors in the history of Japanese

Abstract

This study deals with issues related to the development of stand-alone adverbial connectors such as totan(-ni), shunkan(-ni), hyoosi(-ni), and yasaki(-ni) in sentence-initial position in the history of Japanese. These adverbial connectors, which can be witnessed from the early twentieth century, developed from the erstwhile head of adnominal clauses through a series of steps, i.e. reanalysis. The adverbial connectors under investigation here serve to anticipate more to come in the following discourse, labeled projectors by Hopper and Thompson (2008). In a nutshell, the emergence of adverbial connectors involves an increase in structural scope over a stretch of discourse.