Literary forms and semantic representations of focus

Abstract

Fabb (2004) made a distinction between linguistic forms and literary forms. Linguistic forms hold of a text by virtue of being generated by a linguistic representation of the text, while literary forms hold of a text by virtue of being the content of thought about the text. The present article discusses whether the observed emphatic construction in Old Japanese texts is a linguistic form or implied literary form. The emphatic construction is [p-koso q-e], concordance of the emphatic particle koso with the sentence ending form -e (conjunctive subordinator), which is found primarily in literary contexts. Ohno (1993) argued that koso -e shifted its uses over the period of Old to Early Middle Japanese. The process of shift involves three stages: i) the contrastive uses, ii) the concessive uses, and iii) the simple emphatic uses. In Ohno’s analysis, the shift from (i) to (ii) is non-distinctive, but (ii) is aesthetically more complex. I argue that the shift of koso -e from (i) to (ii) is a semantic change from literal form to linguistic form, and that linguistic form may appear less distinct due to the literary form associated with the emphatic construction.