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It is customarily understood that Vietnamese has three series of demonstratives. In the literature the distance between the referent and the speaker on the one hand, and the addressee on the other, is usually mentioned as the criteria of classification of their deictic uses. In addition, the referent in the memory is said to be referred to by the medial đó which is supposed to point to an intermediate proximity. In the present paper, it is shown, on the basis of the examples from novels, that:
This study discusses generational and regional variations of high vowel devoicing. Phonetic factors affecting vowel devoicing including word accent are also covered. Material was taken from a database collected throughout Japan between 1986 and 1989, which includes 607 respondents (308 high school students and 299 of the students' grandparents) from 41 prefectures. The data were acoustically analyzed. Devoicing rate of the younger generation is higher than that of the grandparents' generation in many regions. The degree of generational variation differs from region to region, and regional variation still remains in the younger generation. In most regions, irrespective of the generation, the devoicing rate is significantly lower when the following vowel (V2) is a high vowel than a non-high vowel. Previous studies have mentioned vowel devoicing occurs less in Toohoku and Kinki than in Kantoo because of intervocalic voicing of a voiceless consonant in Toohoku and word accent in Kinki. However, the results show that there is no more voicing in this environment in the younger generation in Toohoku and less devoicing occurs even in a LH word in Kinki, which bring us to the conclusion that these are no longer limiting factors of vowel devoicing.
Examining some of the properties exhibited by the verb taste in relation to middle constructions and constructions in which other perception verbs occur, the present paper argues that the grammatical behavior of taste is motivated by the following facts: (i) only via active exploration can taste experience be acquired, and (ii) what is usually discovered in taste experience is not the food or the drink as a whole, but its individual ingredients.
The present paper examines the verbs bi and bimbi in the Manchu of the Man Han Shi Jing (prefaced in 1654). The following are the results:
The noun of the Tsubota dialect has n+2 accent types in n-mora nouns. Tsubota dialect has an 'ascending kernel', which can be placed at any mora of the word. The kernel can be also placed at the following mora from the end of the word. I call this type the 'hamidashi' type.
The kernel of the 'hamidashi' type is realized at an 'imaginary' mora (ex. /kotoba-[(▽)/; ‘▽’: mora of particle, ‘/[/’: ascending kernel). While the kernel of the 'hamidashi' type is realized as expected when followed by a case particle (ex. kotoba-[ga; ' [ ': ascent of pitch), it is realized one mora ahead when followed by an adverbial particle (fuku-joshi), thus at the last mora of the word (ex. koto[ba-mo).
Amis has six markers which designate the pragmatic information or semantic role of a noun phrase they attach to: the predicative (marking the predicate of a sentence), the topicative (marking the topic of a sentence), genitive (marking possessor, actor, and experiencer), accusative (marking patient, theme, recipient, location, time, and degree), locative (marking location and direction), and ablative (marking source). Pronouns have the following categories: predicative/topicative, accusative, possessive, genitive, and locative. Among pronouns, only the first person singular, the second person singular, and the first person plural inclusive pronouns have the distinction between possessive and genitive.
In Sibe Manchu, the verb ila- 'to stay' may function as auxiliary verb, following verbs and adjectives. In such cases, ila- denotes either "temporality" or "continuity" depending on the aspectual characteristics of the verbs and adjectives preceding it. In the present paper, I will point out a (pragmatic) condition of the usage of the auxiliary verb ila-: "temporal states" and "ongoing activities" expressed by ila- have to be directly perceived by the addresser. The comparison with another auxiliary verb bi- 'to exist' will reveal that the Sibe auxiliary verbs systematically encode different stances of the addresser toward the situation.
Dans les manuscrits en tokharien A, on trouve des manuscrits appelés ‘Prachtstücke’, qui racontent l’histoire intitulée «Puṇyavanta-Jātaka». Depuis la publication de ses translittérations dans TochSprR(A), ces documents ont été traités par plusieurs chercheurs, et il est devenu un des textes tokhariens bien connus dans la tokharologie. Jì Xiàn-lín a publié un article important (1943) sur ce texte: il a traduit des textes chinois parallèles à plusieurs contes cités dans le «Puṇyavanta-Jātaka» en tokharien A. Bien que son article ait fait progresser notre compréhension de ce texte, il reste encore des problèmes à résoudre.
Le présent article a pour objet de comparer les vers cités dans ce texte tokharien (A3a2-4a1=THT636a2-637a1) avec ceux en plusieurs langues, notamment en chinois et en sanskrit. Ces vers sont déjà connus en plusieurs versions et le manuscrit sanskrit du Śikhālaka-sūtra comporte les vers les plus proches de ceux du texte tokharien A. Des six versions chinoises, les vers du Saṃyuktāgama (Zá Āhán Jīng, T02, no.99) sont les plus proches de ceux du Śikhālaka-sūtra. Cette correspondance pourrait montrer que ces vers tokhariens seraient cités à partir de l’Āgama-sūtra de l’école Mūla-sarvāstivādin, car Enomoto (1980) a déjà prouvé que la version chinoise du Saṃyuktāgama appartenait à l’école Mūla-sarvāstivādin. Plusieurs sūtras du Saṃyuktāgama ont été aussi découverts par lui (1997) dans les manuscrits bilingues en sanskrit et tokharien A. Ces faits confirment la possibilité que le bouddhisme en tokharien A aurait connu l’Āgama-sūtra de l’école Mūla-sarvāstivādin. En plus, le fragment sanskrit découvert à Šorčuq qui correspond au Śikhālaka-sūtra comporte des gloses en tokharien B (SHT3354). Cela prouve que ce canon était connu aussi du bouddhisme en tokharien B: celui-ci aurait connu l’Āgama-sūtra de l’école Mūla-sarvāstivādin comme le bouddhisme en tokharien A.
K.T.Schmidt (1985) a proposé que le bouddhisme tokharien appartenait à l’école Sarvāstivādin. Cependant, Hu-von Hinüber (1994) a fait remarquer la possibilité que le bouddhisme tokharien aurait connu aussi l’école Mūla-sarvāstivādin d’après un fragment sanskrit du Poṣadha-vastu qui comporte des gloses en tokharien A (SHT 1033). L’existence de textes de Vinaya en tokharien B de l’école Mūla-sarvāstivādin a été traitée par C. Schaefer (1997) et l’auteur (forthc.) sur la base des manuscrits en tokharien B qui ont les mêmes prescriptions que celles de l’école Mūla-sarvāstivādin. Il est temps de reconsidérer l’affiliation sectaire du bouddhisme tokharien du point du vue de la transmission du bouddhisme.
In this paper we discuss semantic perspectives and event-classifying functions of a group of verbal prefixes and derived verbs in Tinrin and Neku. Tinrin and Neku are two critically endangered Oceanic languages spoken by respectively, c.264 and c.221 people in the central-southern part of the main island of New Caledonia.
We shall be looking at verbs composed of two morphological elements: an event-classifying prefix, and a verbal root. Event-classifying prefixes are a group of verbal prefixes existing both in Tinrin and Neku that are characterized by morpho-syntactic and semantic features, as elaborated in this paper. Osumi (1995) termed them 'classificatory prefixes' in the sense that they produce a set of verbs classified by the means or manner which are indicated by them. Similar verbal affixes have developed in some North American languages, traditionally called instrumental affixes, and in some Austronesian languages from the Papua New Guinea group. Several New Caledonian languages have also been reported as having similar sets of prefixes. Some languages abound in lexical verbal prefixes, each of which is affixed only to a few verb stems or to those in a more open class, which are likely to be of a different nature.
In this paper, we do not intend to discuss typological features across languages, but we will examine in detail the semantic nature of these verbal prefixes in Tinrin and Neku, focusing on their important functions as event-classifying morphemes, and that of the verb stems that they can combine with. We will show how these prefixes form an interesting continuum around basic semantic actions and movements, intrinsically combined with open-hand or instrumental means, along with verb stems which also indicate varied, continuing resultative situations.
This paper deals with the directional prefix óŋ- in Tiddim Chin, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in northwestern Myanmar and northeast India. The directional prefix óŋ- not only expresses deictic spatial direction and change of state, but functions as an inverse marker. It is mandatory to affix the directional prefix óŋ- to the verb, when a grammatical object argument (PATIENT, CAUSEE, etc. in semantic roles) indicates a speaker (1st person) or a hearer (2nd person) in the transitive or the causative clause. The grammatical feature related to the directional and inverse prefix óŋ- in Tiddim Chin shows the linguistic diversity of Chin languages, as this sort of feature cannot be found in the Central Chin languages.
Modern phonology pursues many varieties of regularities in the field of morphophonology. However, the surface representation is often unsystematic and involves a mixture of levels, which weakens the argument. The phonological theory of Shirô Hattori aims to establish systematic representation of the surface forms. A reappraisal of his theory and an incorporation of its important points can contribute to the development of contemporary phonological theories. From this standpoint, I try to clarify the characteristics of Hattori's phonology, and present my own viewpoint on the problems.
A corpus-based analysis of Japanese lexical and morphological causative constructions has found that lexical causatives are used much more commonly than their morphological counterparts. In an attempt to overcome the inadequacy of some previous studies of the difference between these two causative forms, an account featuring two parameters, (1) the causer's control over the causee (or the caused event) and (2) the autonomy of the causee, is provided and is shown to cover a wider range of data.
This is a preliminary report on the findings in a questionnaire survey investigating which of the three Turkish demonstratives bu, şu and o should be chosen in various contexts. Questions were arranged so that they would form a short funny story and respondents could easily imagine concrete situations where question sentences are uttered. The survey was carried out in September 2008 at Ahmet Rasim High School in Istanbul with the assistance of Mr. Muhsin Korkmaz and Prof. Musa Duman. 59 students voluntarily participated in it. The results show that where the speaker or the hearer is, whether referents are in the speaker’s hand, and the introduction of referents by explaining them may converge the choice of respondents, while responses diffuse even if referents are visible or known by both the speaker and the hearer.
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