| The aims of this study are to investigate the nature of nominal predication in Old Japanese, in particular that involving the adnominal form of the copula, no, to examine several of the uses of what is generally termed the particle no, and to show that there are a number of different, homophonous entities here which have all been erroneously assumed to be extensions of the usage of the nominative/genitive particle no.;The sources of Old Japanese used are the songs to be found in the eighth century works of (mythological) history, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, the poems of the Man'yoshu, and of the Bussokuseki no uta.;Along with synchronic descriptions of the various lexical items under investigation, the changes that they have undergone in later periods are also traced, and, making use of the theory of internal reconstruction, various hypotheses as to their origins are proposed. It was concluded that while the adverbial no is clearly to be related to the group of verbs niru, nasu, and nosu, the copular no is to be derived from a pre-Old Japanese verb of location *nu. The necessary evidence for these analyses is to be found not only within the central dialect of the time, but also in the eastern dialects.;In the course of the diachronic side of this investigation it becomes clear that there are several types of historical changes taking place at the same time in the language, and in some instances the conclusions one can draw from these changes is not that the language is proceeding in a steady manner in a specific direction, but that in the end these processes are circular. On the one hand, they result in the creation of new independent items, such as is the case in the verbs niru, nasu, and nosu, which are argued to derive form the affixation of verbal formants to already existing words, and on the other they result in formerly independent words changing into verbal affixes and particles. The latter was shown to be the case for the copular no and ni. |
