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영어

The purpose of this study is to examine the morphological and semantic changes of the Onomatopoée with the alternation of hara and horo from the Early Modern Japanese through the Late Modern Japanese. We have already reported that the adjectival base hara was productively derivational as shown in the alternation of hara and horo in the Ancient Japanese. Since the late 8th century, morphologically and semantically diverse forms have been derived from hara, whose core meaning was assumed to be san (to scatter). During its derivational process, its auditory sense became a fossilized form in the Middle Japanese. In the morphological aspect, the Late Modern Japanese has gradually lost a variety of forms of Onomatopoée with the alternation found in the Early Modern Japanese literature, which mainly comprises a lot of spoken materials such as playscripts. Meanwhile the Onomatopoée with voiced consonants such as bara-bara and boro-boro has increased, reaching up to 90% of all the hara-horo type of Onomatopoée in the Late Modern Japanese. In the semantic aspect, the Onomatopoée has acquired a new meaning, viz. psychological situation, from its original literal meaning. horori, originally depicting a situation in which tears fall, was seantically extended to cover a poor, pitiful situation where one may cry. As the Onomatopoée with bara gained a sense of something scattered, its voiceless counterpart—i.e. the Onomatopoée with hara-hara—began to be extended to mean a psychologically and emotionally messy situation.