The Inflexional System of Classical Japanese

The present book focuses on the morphological analysis of Classical Japanese verbal and adjectival forms. It does not present any new facts (or hardly any), but attempts to describe them in a new way. Therefore, the linguistic material quoted below, which has already been known for a long time, is neither questioned nor even confronted with the original manuscripts, but is instead taken from editions commonly regarded as standard. Moreover, no particular research has been conducted on the semantic value of each morpheme, although a good many new ideas can be found here as well. In both questions, morphological and semantic alike, the number of recognised elements has been reduced to the indispensable minimum, applying Occam’s razor whenever possible.