ABSTRACT
A noun/verb ratio has been used to explain various aspects of language and language production, including the elucidation of a noun orientation in SVO languages such as English and a verb preference in SOV languages such as Japanese. This study presents a preliminary investigation into a noun/verb ratio in classical Japanese poetry to illuminate how poets leveraged grammatical resources for aesthetic ends. To that end, this study focuses on 短歌 (tanka) (literally, ‘short poem’), as represented by the 13th-century anthology of tanka, 小倉百人一首 (Ogura hyakunin isshu), to answer a set of three related research questions: (1) What is a noun/verb ratio at the moraic level of tanka? (2) How is that ratio expressed in the patterned use of nouns and verbs at the phrase level of tanka? and (3) To what extent can such ratios function as indicators of syntactic and rhetorical complexity in tanka? This study reports a marked noun orientation in classical Japanese from multiple perspectives while shedding further light on the noun/verb ratio as it relates to the characteristics of the Japanese language in general and the attributes of tanka as an enduring poetic form of Japanese utterances.
