Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This paper proposes that nominalization structures in early Japanese and Korean display syntagmatic parallels in three important inflections and/or suffixes: a base adnominal inflection *-r (and its agentively-marked variant *-or), a resultative infinitival and substantivizing inflection *-a, and a nominal suffix *ku expressing circumstances that I label ‘absolute’. I show that two of these nominalizations in Proto-Japanese, the fossilized nominal [ADN+*a] and the ku-nominal [ADN+*a+*ku], match part-for-part the construction of complex sequential nominalizations in Proto-Korean, and proposes Proto-Japano-Koreanic reconstructions for these patterns and their constituent elements. In so doing, this paper refutes the strong claim by Vovin that Japanese and Korean share “no common paradigmatic morphology,” and concludes with providing a framework for understanding how morphological mismatches between the two languages might shed light on grammatical changes in their proto-languages.