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Tokyo University Linguistic Papers Vol. 24 : Abstracts

Tekmen, Ayşe Nur, "Aspect of Japanese Verbs of Giving and Receiving (yari-morai dōshi)"

The verbs of giving and receiving is one of the difficult topics in the grammar of Japanese. There are three basic “verbs of giving and receiving ” in Japanese. “ageru (yaru), kureru, morau”. These verbs are not only used to express the basic action of giving and receiving, but also to show as auxiliaries the direction of the action, the favor situation among the speaker, hearer and referent being thereby observed in a sentence. These verbs also have honorific styles (sashiageru, kudasaru, itadaku). But the most basic problem is the aspect of these verbs.
In this study, factors affecting the natural usage of the verbs of giving and receiving, and the rules of aspect (pragmatical rules) are defined with concrete examples.

EBATA Fuyuki, "Morphophonological alternation in the suffixation of Sakha (Yakut)"

Sakha (Yakut) is a language with agglutinative and suffixing morphology. In suffixation both suffixes and stems alternate according to the segmental and syllabic structure of stems. Alternation is in most cases regular, but appears complicated because some rules can be applied simultaneously. In this paper morphophonological rules affecting alternation of stems and suffixes have been identified, and stems have thus been classified into five groups. It has also been shown that these findings lead us to a consistent analyses into morphemes. In the latter half of the paper productive suffixes have been listed with allomorphs.

EBINA, Daisuke, "On Interpretations of the Subject Suffix on the Nominalized Verb Forms in Cuzco Quechua"

Cuzco Quechua has a set of person suffixes, each of which usually refers to the person of the agent when it is attached to a nominalized verbal form, just like when it is attached to a finite verb. The same set of person suffixes express, however, the possessor when the stem is a noun, and not a nominalized verbal form. Except when a person suffix is attached to a -q form, one of the four nominalized verb forms, then it refers, not to the person of the agent, but to the person of the patient when the object is human, and the person of the possessor when the object is non-human. Thus the -q form can be seen as showing more noun-like character than the other three nominalized verb forms, as it alone allows the interpretation of the suffix as referring to the person of the possessor. This observation is supported by the fact that the -q form shows more noun-like character in its syntactic behavior; it never has a subject, unlike the other three nominalized verb forms.

Arkadiusz Jabłoński, "Honorific Modification and Layered Model of Communication"

The issues concerning keigo, keigo hyōgen, taigū hyōgen and kotobazukai have been raised by Japanese linguists for a long time. In this paper I present an approach to Japanese honorifics based on the notion of honorific modification (HM). Contrary to the explanation offered by the previous keigo-related theories, HM is treated not (solely) as information contained in or appended to a message in order to ‘express respect’ but rather as a crucial component of the communication process. HM constitutes a language sub-system managing the information flow between the involved parties. It may be considered a background structure serving as a lower layer (providing non-informative contents of a message) for higher layers of the communication process (managing the informative contents of a message).

Kang Youngsuk, "The Accent System of the Eastern Gyeonsangnamdo Dialects"

This paper investigates the accent systems of the eastern Gyeongsangnamdo dialects. The Miryang and Samrangjin dialects show an n+2-way opposition for words of n syllables. The Haman, Uiryeong, Masan, Jinhai and Kimhai dialects show an n+2-way opposition for words of three or fewer syllables, and an n+1-way opposition for words of four or more syllables. In all these dialects two principles, the accent kernel and word tone, can be seen to coexit.

KOJIMA Yasuhiro, "The conditional sentence expressing undesirability: perfect in tu protasis in Modern Georgian"

The present paper investigates semantic and pragmatic aspects of a type of conditional sentence of Modern Georgian wherein the protasis is led by tu ‘if’ and its predicate verb is in the perfect form. When the protasis expresses a hypothetical future event, an utterance of the conditional sentence performs a type of speech act which would be characterized as ‘threat’, or ‘prohibition’, with the content of the protasis being evaluated as undesirable by the speaker.

LEE Munsuk, "The Prosody of the Kwangju Dialect in Chollanam-do"

The present paper attempts to clarify the prosody of the Kwangju dialect, which is in the process of decay similar to that of the Chonju dialect.

The accent of the Kwangju dialect can be classified into the following three classes:

  1. the initial high and a row of lows for the rest;
  2. the first two syllables maintain the same height;
  3. the initial low with the high second syllable.

However, there are strong tendencies for the words with tense, aspirated, s or h initial (termed as special consonants here) to belong to class B, and for the rest of the words to belong to class C. As a result, each class has quite uneven membership.

For longer words (four or more syllables) class A becomes rarer, and, if the initial is one of the special consonants, they merge into class B. Words with a initial long vowel syllable shorten it, with unstable prosodic patterns, which suggests, in writer's opinion, a change in progress.

In summary, the Kwangju dialect shows the following changes in prosody:

Tatsuyuki MIMURA, "Phonology of Danish Schwa -- with special reference to stød-sandhi --"

In this paper, we shall discuss the phonemic status of Danish schwa, and we draw a conclusion that the schwa has to be regarded as an independent phoneme and be distinguished from other vowel phonemes on account of its distribution. The relevance of schwa is also demonstrated by the fact that the morphological assignment of the stød triggered by nominal singular definite suffixes, -en and -et, does not take place in the words whose root morphemes contain a schwa in the final syllables. To dichotomize phonemically the schwa and the other vowels make it possible to give an account for such an absence of stød.

SON Jaehyun, "The Accents of Verbs and Adjectives in the Daegu and Gyeongju Dialects"

The aim of this paper is to describe various verbal forms in accentuation. They are summarized as follows:

  1. The accent patterns of the monosyllabic stem verbs show a regular correlation to the segmental phonology of the word, namely to whether it has an initial syllable with a long vowel, or with a tense or aspirated consonant.
  2. It can also be pointed out that the accent patterns of disyllabic stem verbs are closely related to the patterns of conjugations.

UWANO, Zendo, "Accents of the alphabet-related words in Japanese dialects"

Accents of the names of letters of the alphabet, compound nouns beginning with alphabetical letters, and initialisms in some Japanese dialects are investigated. The results are as follows:

  1. In the two-pattern accent systems of Kyuushuu districts, some dialects pronounce all the names of the letters as A-type, while others differentiate them between A-type and B-type depending on the number of syllables in the letter's pronunciation.
  2. We have many multi-unit accentual forms in the initialisms of the Hioki-Fukiage dialect of Kagoshima, and sandhi forms are posited to describe the tonal patterns.
  3. The initialisms in the Ibuki-jima dialect of Kagawa prefecture have the low-beginning rising register with the accent kernel on the first mora of the last alphabet letter, together with the kernelless pattern when the last letter has two-syllable two-mora structure.
  4. The alphabet compounds in the Shizukuishi dialect of Iwate prefecture have a peculiarity that the accent kernel appears in the first element, just as in numeral compounds.

XU Yongxin, "An empirical study of the Japanese o-causative and ni-causative"

In Japanese causative sentences, the causee is marked with either accusative or dative in the causative of an intransitive verb. They are known as o-causative and ni-causative, respectively.

In the literature the o-causative is mostly considered as a coercive causation and the ni-causative as a permissive one. However, upon examination of a large scale corpus of the Asahi Shimbun online database, no distinct difference can be found between them in meaning.

The present paper draws the following three conclusions:

  1. There is a remarkable difference in the number of instances between the o-causative and the ni-causative.
  2. In spite of the customary claims in the literature, it is not possible to dichotomize these two causative forms into coercive and permissive.
  3. The distinct difference between the o-causative and the ni-causative is the following: In the coercive case, when the causee has no volition, the o-causative is used, and the ni-causative is unnatural.

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