LINGUIST List 6.474

Thu 30 Mar 1995

Qs: Japanese, Verbal compounding, Aum Shinri Kyo, Gender & lg

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1. , Summer school courses in Japanese
2. (ohn Kinder, [N+V] verbal compounding
3. David Ganelin, Query: Japanese Dialects
4. David P. Baxter, Aum Shinri Kyo
5. John Kinder, Gender & language shift/maintenance

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 I am an undergraduate major in linguistics and will be going to Japan
to teach English next fall. I would like to inquire about summer school
courses in Japanese that stress communicative competence at the beginning
level, preferrably on the East Coast. Are there any, and what are the
specifics?
 Thank you in advance.

Robert Ball
jballpomona.edu

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 We are two researchers at the Universitat de Girona (SP) and we
are working on a kind of Catalan verbal compounding. We sumarize the
characteristics of these compounds here below. We are interested in
other VO languales with the same (or similar) process of verb
formation. Moreover, we wonder if anybody knows references related, in
some way, to our subject that could be helpful to us (We already know
Rosen, S.T.(1989), Miller (1993)).

 [N+V] VERBAL COMPOUNDING

 To be more clear we enumerate the relevant characteristics of our
compounds.

 1. First of all, we must say that Catalan is a VO language.

 2. Our compounding looks like a process of Noun Incorporation
where the incorporated noun within the lexical item is the internal
argument in the syntactic structure. Observe (1)

 (1) a. El cacador trenca la cama de l'ocell
 "the hunter breaks the leg of the bird"
 b. El cacador camatrenca l'ocell
 "the hunter leg+breaks the bird"

 3. Nevertheless, the noun-incorporation doesn't affect to the
capacity of the verb of assigning acusative case, this is, the
complex verb remains transitive.

 4. Generally, this kind of "noun-incorporation" is only possible
when the noun incorporated is an inalienable possession noun (IPN)
and the new internal argument of the complex verb is the possessor.
Observe (2) and (3):

 (2) a. corferir
 "to heart+hurt"
 b. colltorcer
 "to neck+twist"

 (3) a. *cadiratrencar
 "to chair+break"
 b. *ferrotorcer
 "to iron+twist"

 5. We hypothesise that the IPN acts as a kind of modifier in the
complex verbal form and doestn't act as a verbal argument.

Olga Fullana Noell
Lluisa Gracia
Pl.Ferrater Mora n.1
Universitat de Girona
E-17071 Girona
Spain
fullanaskywalker.udg.es
graciaskywalker.udg.es

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Dear Linguist List Subscribers,

I need information of any kind regarding 'innovative' and 'conservative'
dialects and/or variations in Japanese. Unfortunately, I must ask that
any data sent be in English; I am fully aware of how much of a limitation
this creates. Thank you in advance for your cooperation and consideration.

Please reply directly to me at: ganelinnetcom.com

David Ganelin

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What is Aum?

The Japanese police are currently investigating a religious sect called
"Aum Shinri Kyo" in relation to last week's gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
Aum Shinri Kyo has been translated as "Sublime Truth" in the press. With my
limited knowledge of Japanese, I know that Shinri can be glossed as 'truth'
and Kyo is a Sino-Japanese morpheme found at the end of the names of many
if not most religions. Aum, however, is a bit of a puzzler. Japanese
phonology only allows syllable-final [m] as an allophone of /N/ before
labial consonants, which is not the case here.

Does anyone know what this Aum means, where it comes from, and if it is
pronounced with a final [m] by speakers of Japanese?

David P. Baxter
Urbana, Illinois
dbaxteruxa.cso.uiuc.edu

A student of mine is beginning a thesis on the role of gender in accounting
for shift vs. maintenance in situations involving a national or standard
language, and minority languages including dialect. Her focus is the
survival (or otherwise) of Italian dialects in Italy and among Italian
migrants in Australia, but she would be grateful for references to any
different contexts as well, for comparison purposes. Any recent studies of
gender as a sociolinguistic variable would also be welcome.
I will post a summary. Thanks.

______________

Dr John Kinder
Department of Italian
University of Western Australia
Perth W.A. 6009 Tel: + 61 9 380-2192
AUSTRALIA Fax: + 61 9 380-1150