Hentai Kambun Perspective on Short Scrambling

Abstract

This paper undertakes an analysis of the word order characteristics of hentai kambun, the archaic Japanese writing style employed for recording Japanese in a way that outwardly resembles Chinese. As amethod of writing Japanese, however, hentai kambun differs conspicuously from standard classical Chinese. Traditional accounts of these deviations tend to treat them as random mistakes in Chinese grammar due to influence from the writer's native Japanese. In contrast to this, the current paper views hentai kambun as a systematic representation of Japanese, rather than as an imitation of Chinese. Specifically, I propose that hentai kambun word order can receive a systematic account by assuming that Japanese has underlying head-initial word order, as proposed by Kayne (1994) and Whitman (2000), and that hentai kambun is a representation of this underlying order. This paper further investigates word order in ditransitive clauses and finds that the hentai kambun representation of dative-accusative and accusative-dative word order alternation provides evidence that what is traditionally referred to as "short scrambling" can in fact be analyzed as base-generation, as proposed in Miyagawa (1997).