Morphosyntactic changes and sociolinguistic variation in the language of kyōgen. A corpus-based analysis of Toraakirabon (1642)

The aim of this paper is to analyse morphosyntactic structures in the language of kyōgen – a traditional form of Japanese comic theatre developed in the 14th century – from a sociolinguistic perspective, i.e. by highlighting differences in usage across various categories of characters, using the Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ). This paper will focus on the use of the particles ga and no with nominative and attributive functions and on the decline of kakari-musubi with koso in Toraakirabon (1642). The analysis will reveal that linguistic characterisation is rendered not only through the lexicon, but also, as in the case of female characters, through a particular use of morphosyntactic structures, which appears less influenced by linguistic innovations.