Japanese/Korean Linguistics

The Japanese language, throughout its attested history, has a good number of transitive-intransitive verb ‘pairs’. In Old Japanese, the e-endings participate in transitivity alternations, but they apparently exhibit two opposite functions in different verb forms, namely transitivizing and detransitivizing. This paper provides a novel Distributed Morphology-based account of the Old Japanese facts, arguing that the e-endings have an asymmetrical dual status at this stage of the language. While some e-endings involve a v head -y-, which may be directly suffixed to the root, other e-endings manifest a separate suffix -e- which is located higher in the verbal domain. The v head -y- is an intransitivizer which invariably derives intransitive verbs, whereas the higher head -e- is in fact an inner-aspectual element underspecified regarding transitivity, whose real function is to license change of state.