Chapter 1. From comparative standard marker to comparative adverb

Abstract

This study investigates the grammaticalization of the Japanese ablative marker yori ‘from’ into a comparative standard marker ‘than’ and further into a comparative adverb yori ‘more.’ It is widely known that ablative markers can be grammaticalized into comparative standard markers. However, little is known about the direction of change from comparative marker to comparative adverb. This study takes a corpus-based approach to uncover the process of change. The ablative yori , which had been used since Old Japanese, began to take on the adverbial property ‘more’ in the early twentieth century. While some collocational sequences facilitate the grammaticalization of yori , the overall degree of change turns out to be very slow.