Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Creation of Narrative Structure:Early Heian Japanese Translations of Sinitic Buddhist Texts.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Kundokubun, the linguistic variety that arose from transposing and reciting Sinitic texts in Japanese, is as old as the act of reading itself in Japan. The religious and political classes who learned, copied, and propagated Buddhist sutras during the Heian period (794–1185 CE) used kundokubun when reciting them in Japanese. These sutras are presented as first-hand accounts narrated by someone who witnessed the Buddha addressing and conversing with a host of assembled followers. Although most of these sutras originated in India, they arrived in Japan in their Sinitic renditions. However, in translating these texts into Japanese, the monks had to read between the lines, both figuratively and literally. Figuratively, because Chinese does not express the same range of grammatical categories found in Japanese, such as those we find in the latter’s complex agglutinative predicate morphology. To effectively communicate in Japanese, the translators had to add tense, aspect, modality, honorifics, and other markers to predicates and case particles to nouns. Literally, because in order to preserve their translations in writing they used diacritic markings between, and occasionally on, the source text’s Chinese characters to denote the appropriate Japanese morphosyntax and occasionally phonology. This dissertation examines morphological marking in Early Heian Japanese renditions of Buddhist texts to explain how tense, aspect, and modality create narrative frames in kundokubun discourse. It utilizes rubrics and techniques of narrative studies and linguistic analysis to show how Japanese monks created inspirational narratives in kundokubun through the act of translation during the early Heian period.In contrast with the acclaimed vividness of more vernacular wabun tales, kundokubun has commonly been defined as a more formalized register of Japanese, due to its abundance of calques, which is a consequence of its Sinitic source texts. Thus, while the narrative functions of tense, aspect, and modality auxiliaries have been studied in Heian period wabun texts, there has yet to be a study that relates the findings of such studies to narrative structure in kundokubun. While informed by an appreciation for the pragmatic roles of these auxiliaries in secular wabun tales, this study further determines the narrative functions of six auxiliaries—ki, keri, tu, nu, ari, and tari—in the genre of early Heian kundokubun texts.This research sheds new light on a crucial facet of the introduction of Buddhism to Japan—the rhetorical role of Japanese grammar in shaping and presenting the stories that would bridge two cultures at a turning point in Japan’s history, not long after the technology of writing had arrived from China.