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The present paper examines the change from the converb of the verbal root ikj- 'to go' to the case marker zjɨ seen in the Yuwan dialect, Amami-Ôshima (North Ryukyu). It can be shown from the co-occurrence restriction of the case-marker (grammaticalized zjɨ) and the converb (pre-grammaticalized izjɨ) that the former retains the lexical meaning prior to grammaticalization, which is rather unusual cross-linguistically.
The present paper reports on the bilabial trills in the Senoo dialect, Okayama prefecture. In this dialect, the bilabial trills are allophones of /p, b/ before /u, o/. They appear frequently in heavy syllables, as well as light syllables in prominence, which suggests that the vibration reflects the strength of expiration.
This paper presents the current situation of the modern Istanbul dialect of Jewish Spanish, which is in danger of extinction due to the reduced number of its speakers. On the basis of the data obtained from the research on the basic vocabulary conducted in Istanbul, it is also observed that quite a few differences in phonology, morphology and lexicon from the modern standard Spanish point to the influence from Turkish, the dominant language of the area.
This presentation discusses issues related to adding the kaida and sūchūma scripts of the Yaeyama islands in Okinawa into the Supplementary Multilingual Plane of Unicode, a recently-developed extension to the basic double-byte system that enables ancient and obsolete scripts to be encoded. Font creation, input methods, methods of handling variant characters, character naming and numbering conventions, and the use of private characters along with conventionally-encoded characters will be addressed. A font designed to input these characters will be demonstrated and an in-progress Unicode proposal will be introduced.
Arabic loan words in Hausa undergo epenthesis or resyllabification to resolve consonant clusters impermissible in the language. The present study collects and classifies examples where clusters in Arabic are resyllabified, or consonants changed, in view of the researches on the syllabic structure of Hausa as well as on the adaptation according to the syllabic structure in loan words.
Since the beginning of the 20th century the compound of the type 'noun = noun' in Italian can be observed increasingly frequently in newspapers and literary works. The present paper analyses the structure of these compounds and classifies them in comparison with the traditional types of nominal expressions. Rather frequent instances of calque suggest that one of the factors contributing to the development of the compound is the influence of English and German.
Morphological processes in Amis, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, cannot be divided into two dichotomous categories 'inflection' and 'derivation'. In this presentation, I point out that inflection and derivation are but two extremes at either end in a hierarchy, and propose two alternatives to the dichotomous approach:
In Classical Nahuatl, locatives do not specify their spatial semantic roles. This presentation compares the spatial system of Classical Nahuatl with that of Yucatec reported by Bohnemeyer et al., and argues that the spatial system of Classical Nahuatl is not a Yucatec-type 'radically V-framed' one, but a 'distributively framed' one, where both grammatical and non-grammatical clues play an important role in interpreting locatives.
The accent system of the Owase dialect (Mie Prefecture) is as follows:
Nouns in Register B have two alternants according to the phonological environment.
The present paper reports that in Japanese Sign Language the location of a hand or hands functions as a social deixis for the degree of intimacy or hierarchical relationship. It also points out that the deictic center of these expressions can vary as they are influenced by other spatial systems like comparison.
This presentation considers how the loa‘a-type verbs, which behave in an unusual way with regard to argument-taking, should be treated within Hawaiian grammar in view of ergativity. My proposals are the following:
Following J. Killen’s proposal that the contraction *-eye- > -ē- had already taken place in Mycenaean, I argue that Mycenaean e-re-e may, contrary to the previous interpretation (/erehen/ < *h1erh1-sen), represent a formation from the present stem (/erēhen/ < *ere-ye-hen). Greek therefore gives no unambiguous support for Proto-Indo-European infinitive formed with *-sen-(i) from the root.
Hittite is known to have the contrast of the fortis/lenis distinction in stop consonants. Normally, a double stop notation reflects the fortis and a single stop notation the lenis, although in some cases double stops are written in some morph boundaries where etymology expects lenis sounds and single stops where fortis sounds are expected. I argue that this is explainable from the different types of connection between the morphs.
In order to describe a situation where someone's body part (or its analogue) is affected by someone else's action, there are three types of passive construction that speakers of Chinese have at their disposal. This paper analyzes these constructions in an attempt to determine how they differ from each other in terms of the functions they serve in discourse.
The present paper investigates the possessive verb predicates in Indonesian, how the speaker selects, according to the H and L registers, among the possessive verb predicates, and what are the tendency and characteristics of each register.
It has been pointed out (Hopper 1972, Alieva 1992, Moeljadi 2010）that the register plays an important role in the selection of a possessive verb predicate, but the concrete data supporting it is insufficient. A research was conducted therefore in the summer of 2011 in view of the H and L registers determining the selection. Consultants were asked to tell a story either by writing or by speaking. The results are:
In the Lecumberry dialect of Basque spoken in France the ergative marker can be omitted. This phenomenon is different from the promotion of ergative to absolutive in the progressive construction. The omission is impossible in the following two cases:
The present paper describes the vocabulary, phonology and grammar of the Awaji-shima dialect in order to help determine its affinity. The main factors to be considered are the following:
Tone sandhi in Wuzhouhua (梧州話) has the following features:
Altough these features are limited to several Goulou dialects of Yue (粤語勾漏片) among the Chinese dialects, some non-Chinese languages spoken in Guangdong and Guangxi show a similar type of tone sandhi to that of Wuzhou-hua. This fact suggests that tone sandhi in Wuzhou-hua was formed under their influence.
The present paper argues that the English idiom by now means that the possibility of the occurrence of the event described by the expression increases over time and that at the time of utterance the event has already happened. It is not totally synonymous with already; nor does it necessarily imply that the speaker is not absolutely certain that the event has happened as is pointed out in Leech, G. N. and J. Svartvik (2002), A Communicative Grammar of English. The present study also indicates that there are some peculiar syntactic constraints on the use of by now in a negative clause.
This presentation focuses on analyzing the negation system of the Shang Chinese language. In the oracle bone script, the characters 弗, 勿, 不, 弜, 毋 and 亡 are used to indicate negation. Based on previous research such as Djamouri (2001), it is widely thought that transitivity and modality played a central role in structuring the negation system of Shang Chinese. However, several problems remain unexplained. In future research, I would like to take a cognitive approach and use an oracle bone inscription corpus to further shed light on the negative system of Shang Chinese.
The present paper examines several phonological changes in the history of French in view of the change in the accentual pattern. Specifically, it suggests that the establishment of the modern prosodic pattern of CV sequences parallels the change of the accentual pattern from the word accent to the breath-group accent.
The accent in both the Sanjiazi dialect and the Heihe dialect of spoken Manchu is stress accent. The accented syllable is pronounced with more strength and length than the unaccented syllable(s). The accented syllables show one of the four kinds of pitch: high, low, rising or falling. The pitch pattern is not influenced by factors like modality and cannot be predicted. Therefore it is necessary to set up a toneme for the pitch of the accented syllable.
The emergence of the low tone is very likely to have been caused by the accent shift, which made an unaccented syllable with a non-high pitch acquire the accent, without changing its pitch. The accent shift is likely to be caused by two factors:
This paper deals with the particles and exclamations used by Chinese Malaysians in spoken Manglish (Malaysian English). Like intonation in standard British English, particles and exclamations play an important role in conveying a speaker's mood, attitude, feelings, etc. Standard English puts a lot of emphasis on intonation, for it can make a great difference in conveying different kinds of mood and attitude of the speaker. On the other hand, Manglish makes use of the basic intonation patterns of standard English, along with particles and exclamations which are 'enhanced' by tones imported from Chinese and intonation patterns from other local languages as well.
This paper discusses some issues related to the neologism jiŏng (囧) in modern Chinese. What is striking about this word, which had been used in classical Chinese before it became obsolete a long time ago, is that it has been revived in recent years to express new meanings. The word jiŏng (囧), which was used adjectively or adverbially to express the meaning of "bright" or "brightly", has come to convey some kind of human feelings in modern Chinese. Among the factors reasonably considered to be responsible for the semantic change are:
The neologism jiŏng can be used not only adjectivally and adverbially but also as a verb. As it can be found not only in newspapers and magazines, but also as dictionary entries, it might be possible to say that it is on its way to becoming an ordinary vocabulary item.
It is known that there are two different versions of the Shijing (Book of Odes) in the Manchu language with identical prefaces of the Year Shunzhi 11th (1654). The present study shows that Manchu writing in one of the two versions is characteristic of the Shunzhi era (1644-1661) and the other is characteristic of the Kangxi era (1662-1722).
In contrast to previous proposals such as that of Klein (1978, 1985), who argues that the Vedic enclitic particle u has distinct anaphoric and conjunctive functions, I argue that the particle u functions uniformly as a loose conjoiner of clauses, and these clauses can be both dependent and independent. For the etymology, I argue that Vedic u and its cognates stem not from the Proto-Indo-European distal deictic particle *u but from a conjunctive morpheme reconstructable for the protolanguage as *h2(é)u.
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