• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
• /
• v.4 no.1
• /
• pp.1-23
• /
• 2023

The Japanese language, as a typical agglutinating language, permits large noun phrases (NP) containing ten or more morphemes. In this paper, we argue that the nature of the NP in Japanese is changing. Our data are drawn from the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. We conduct a series of apparent-time studies of ongoing changes in complex NPs. We first examine the length of compound nouns, followed by the usage of bound suffixes. We then examine ongoing changes in complex NPs that contain genitive case markers. Finally, we examine noun incorporation. All of our studies show a trend towards shorter, less complex NPs. Furthermore, our results suggest that the usage rate of phrases that modify the noun inside the NP (compound nouns, bound nouns, NPs containing genitive case, noun incorporation) appears to be decreasing over time. On the other hand, the usage rate of modifying material outside of the NP (positional phrases, relative clauses) appears to be increasing over time. We conclude by suggesting that our results reflect a diachronic change of decreasing synthetic morphology and increasing analytic morphology. We end by pointing out the implications of this work on our understanding syntheticity and analyticity.