The Past Tenses of Early Middle Japanese

Sammanfattning: Early Middle Japanese is one of the oldest attested stages of Japanese. Its rich legacy consists of several literary works from the Heian era (7 th to 11 th centuries), some of which are still appreciated and widely read today. Despite a long tradition of research both within and outside Japan, quite a few details of the language remain incompletely understood. The present study addresses a long-standing question in the verbal domain of Early Middle Japanese, namely the semantics of the two so-called “past tenses” in -ki and -ker-. I tested the major hypotheses regarding their use by means of qualitative, corpus-based methods. Specifically, I trained a machine learning algorithm to predict which is likeliest of -ki and -ker- given a set of grammatical and semantic variables. Analysis of the results indicates that the suffixes likely embody a contrast between witnessed and non-witnessed past tense. It is also possible that mirativity—the grammaticalized expression of surprise at learning something unexpected—and aspect influence the choice of past tense suffix.