일본어에서 본 조동사 선택 현상

Abstract

The present paper demonstrates that Japanese used to be a language displaying Auxiliary Selection," a phenomenon which has been unequivocally observed in only some European languages. Evidence for this claim comes from the observation that the perfect auxiliaries in Old Japanese, -tu and -nu, display a close distributional correspondence to the European auxiliaries HAVE and BE, particularly to hebben and zijn in Dutch. This correspondence holds not only in the regular cases where –tu/hebben appear with transitives/unergatives and -nu/zijn with unaccusatives, but also in the irregular cases where some transitive verbs are exceptionally allowed to select -nu/zijn, the auxiliaries which are otherwise expected to appear with unaccusatives. Given that Auxiliary Selection is a possibility once allowed for Japanese, it is worthwhile (re)examining other Asian languages from this particular perspective.