Englishization of the Japanese passive construction: evidence for ‘contact-induced variation’

ABSTRACT

A number of scholars have noted that contact with English has changed the Japanese language in a process of Englishization. While the most profound effects of Englishization may be seen in the influx of new lexemes, deeper structural changes to Japanese syntactic structures and phonology have not been observed with great regularity. A review of previous research on Englishization suggests that syntactic effects of Englishization in Japanese are to be expected. The Japanese ukemi ‘passive’ voice construction has been hypothesized to have been Englishized and close attention is given to those claims. This article examines a corpus of news media texts that can be divided into two sub-corpora: those written in Japanese and those translated from English into Japanese. The indirect passive appears more frequently in texts written in Japanese and in the sub-corpus of translated Japanese its use is limited by the types of verbs that are passivized. The sociolinguistic nature of English in Japan, where the language is taught to nearly every student in the country, suggests that Englishization effects on the passive construction produce contact-induced variation that could be the earliest signs of change in progress.

KEYWORDS:

• Englishization
• ukemi
• ‘passive’
• adversative passive
• corpus linguistics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Thomason and Kaufman (1988) describe the degrees of contact in the five categories of shift as (1) casual contact, (2) slightly more intense contact, (3) more intense contact, (4) strong cultural pressure, and (5) very strong cultural pressure (74-75). Thomason and Kaufman apply their model to two types of language contact situations: language in maintenance and language in shift. The application of the model for this study only describes the lexical and structural changes that might happen in maintenance, since this is more appropriate for the description of Englishization of Japanese.

2. One might argue that baby and yeah are not good examples of content words since, within the context of their appearance within the J-pop songs, they most commonly appear in the chorus to mark rhythm.

3. These more ‘recent’ changes have occurred within the past 500-year history of Japanese (encompassing late-Middle Japanese, Early Modern and Modern Japanese). We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for citing evidence of phonetic [p] without realisation as a phoneme in Heike Monogatari ‘The Tale of Heike’, representing late-Middle Japanese. This phonemic change was probably originally driven by Portuguese loanwords in the 15^th-16^th century.

4. There are several good reasons why self-assessment of English ability was not an appropriate measure of whether the form does indeed represent Englishization. First, unless the Englishized form is directly introduced by English users, this variable would not likely be related to the users who have adopted the form and are promoting its use. Instead, once the form has been introduced into the speech community it is available to all speakers with competence in Japanese regardless of individual proficiencies in English or any other language. Second, it is possible that when participants assess their own English ability it is according to their peer groups and not according to all age groups within the speech community. Because universal English education has the greatest effect upon the youngest group of speakers, self-assessment in English is not likely to compare intergenerationally. A speaker who assessed her ability as low in the youngest age group might assess the same ability as high when they compare to the oldest age group, or all age groups. Therefore, English self-assessment may well mean different things to different age groups.

5. The vast majority of the by-lines contain location, date and time that the story was filed. Occasionally the name of the writer is included in the by-line.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by University of Macau [Research Grant MYRG2018-00177-FAH].