The grammaticalization of nominalizers in Japanese and Korean: A contrastive study

The paper examines the grammaticalization patterns of sentential nominalizers in Japanese and compares them with those found in Korean. The analysis of the nominalization system of Japanese illustrates the multifunctional character of such forms and the existence of differential degrees of grammaticalization among the various nominalizers. Moreover, the comparison of the behaviour of the Japanese nominalizers no and tokoro with their Korean counterparts kes and tey reveals that the former are far more versatile and have evolved to a more advanced stage of grammaticalization. The paper also suggests that the tendency for Korean to exhibit a lesser degree of grammaticalization than Japanese manifests itself in domains other than that of sentential nominalizers, such as the development of periphrastic aspectual constructions.