{"pk":48953,"title":"Referential Density in Japanese: Diachronic Study","subtitle":null,"abstract":"<p>This study investigates referential density (RD) in the history of Japanese through manually annotated data and corpus analysis. Following Bickel’s (2003) RD1 (the ratio of overt argument NPs to available argument positions) and Noonan’s (2003) RD2 (the ratio of overt arguments to verbs), I introduce new indices to quantify the referential contribution of exaltation morphology (keigo). Drawing on prose texts from Old Japanese (OJ) and their contemporary Japanese (cNJ) translations, I demonstrate a diachronic increase in overt arguments (RD2) alongside a decline in honorific marking. While these changes might appear causally related, statistical testing reveals no direct correlation. As a preliminary conclusion, I hypothesise that the observed trends are discourse-driven and not structurally conditioned by morphosyntactic change.</p>","language":"eng","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives  4.0","short_name":"CC BY-NC-ND 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n\nNoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0"},"keywords":[],"section":"Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/71w1r32g","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Artemii","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kuznetsov","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Oxford","department":"AMES"}],"date_submitted":"2025-07-10T15:20:50.835000Z","date_accepted":"2025-07-11T07:05:40.551000Z","date_published":"2025-07-07T07:00:00Z","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/japanesekoreanlinguistics/article/48953/galley/36877/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/japanesekoreanlinguistics/article/48953/galley/36877/download/"}]}