Review of Japanese / Korean Linguistics, Vol. 10 |
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Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 20:25:41 +0000
From: Spas Rangelov <[email protected]>
Subject: Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 10
Akatsuka, Noriko M. and Susan Strauss, ed. (2002) Japanese/Korean
Linguistics, Volume 10. CSLI Publications.
Spas Rangelov, University of London
SYNOPSIS
Japanese/Korean Linguistic Volume 10 is the newest addition to the
Japanese/Korean Linguistics series. In Volume 10 Noriko Akatsuka and
Susan Strauss return as editors of the long-running series (previously
Akatsuka has edited or co-edited Volumes 4, 5 and 7, and Strauss has
co-edited Volumes 5 and 7). Like the previous volumes in this series it
presents papers from the Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, an
annual forum for linguists who work in these fields, mainly in the USA
but also in other countries. The papers in the volume have been
delivered at the Tenth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference that was
held in October 2000. The number of the papers included in the volume
is 45. Twelve of them are by the specially invited speakers and the
rest have been competitively selected. They are divided into five parts
that reflects the conference's "unique division into five panels" (from
the back cover). The book is dedicated to the memory of the
distinguished linguist James D. McCawley (1938-1999) who has
contributed greatly to the development of both Japanese and Korean
linguistics and was, as the editors write, "one of the giants of 20th
century general linguistics." The invited speakers are all his friends
and former students. The name of Jim McCawley gets mentioned in some of
the papers with warmth and admiration. On the second page of the book
there is a reproduction of a photograph of McCawley. After the preface
there is a an account by McCawley that he contributed to the family
newsletter which adds a deeply felt personal touch to the volume.
Part I, Cognition and Grammar, consists of eight papers that deal from
different angles with the interactions of syntax, semantics and
cognition.
The first paper is "On the Interaction of Temporal and Modal Meaning in
Japanese Conditionals" by Wesley M. Jacobsen, one of the invited
speakers. The paper addresses a topic that is related to Japanese
conditionals that have already been examined by the author elsewhere
(Jacobsen 1999). In this further study an account is proposed for the
tendency for aspectually stative conditional clauses to be given a
hypothetical interpretation. The study is in the framework of
establishing correlations between semantic parameters and certain
meanings, e.g. hypothetical meaning.
"Processing Japanese and Korean: Full Attachment versus Efficiency" by
William O'Grady, Michiko Nakamura and Miseon Lee examines the problems
of parsing languages of the type of Japanese and Korean in a formalist
framework. The formalist analyses and processing schemes for SOV
languages and SVO languages are contrasted in the context of machine
processing of texts. A special attention is paid to quantifier
structures and their treatment is based on earlier analyses (O'Grady
1991, Sells 1995). The theoretical and practical implications of this
type of studies are very important for contemporary science.
"Japanese and Korean Causatives Revisited" by Masayoshi Shibatani and
Sung Yeo Chung is an important contribution to the debate on Japanese
and Korean causatives. Despite the similarities, the morphology and
semantics of the causatives in the two languages demonstrate
differences. A contrastive approach actually proves fruitful in
clarifying the morphological and semantic irregularities and mismatches
within each language.
Sung-Chool Im's "Characteristic Lexicalization Patterns of Motion
Events in Korean" uses the conflation patterns of semantic elements in
cognitive semantics to account for three characteristic lexicalization
patterns of motion verbs in Korean in a typological-functional
framework. The paper is clearly written and comprehensively accounts
for the different groups of monomorphemic and polymorphemic motion
verbs.
"The Processing of Wh-phrases and Interrogative Complementizers in
Japanese" by Edson T. Miyamoto and Shoichi Takahashi argues that the
processing of in-situ wh-phrases in Japanese can be explained by the
same procedure that underlies the processing of fronted wh-phrases in
English. Combining the achievements of the generative and the
psycholinguistic traditions, the authors support the proposed model
with the results of a reading time experiment.
"On Sound Symbolism in Japanese and Korean" by Reijirou Shibasaki is
based on two experiments, a psychological one and a phonological one.
The author starts with a working hypothesis about the sound symbolic
words (SSWs) which is reformulated at the end due to the findings. The
study reaches the conclusion that SSWs are rich in quantity,
systematically organized and highly motivated.
Mitsuaki Shimojo's "A Cognitive Account of Extraction Asymmetry in
Japanese Relative Clauses" investigates the similarities and the
differences between the so-called externally-headed relative clauses
(EHRCs) and internally-headed relative clauses (IHRCs) (the latter are
studied in other papers in this book). The author finds that the two
types are analogous in relativization and topicalization but wh-
questions in IHRCs are more restricted than in EHRCs. The study is from
a cognitive perspective.
"Grammar, Cognition and Procedure as Reflected in Route Directions in
Japanese, Korean and American English" by Susan Strauss, Hanae Katayama
and Jong Oh Eun is based on a corpus of 75 spontaneously produced route
directions elicited from people on a university campus in three
different languages: Japanese, Korean and American English. The cross-
linguistic analysis uncovers tendencies in the grammar of each language
which reflect deeper levels of human cognition.
Part II, Discourse and Conversation, consists of eight papers.
The first paper in this part, "When Does Communication Turn Mentally
Inward?: A Case Study of Japanese Formal-to-Informal Switching" by
Seiichi Makino from Princeton University, one of the invited speakers,
addresses the interesting phenomenon of formal-to-informal switching in
the context of Japanese discourse studies. The author discusses the
choice between informal and formal forms at the sentence level and then
investigates the more complex discourse phenomena from a variety of
viewpoints. It is found that formal-to-informal switching signals that
the speaker turns the communicative direction inwardly.
"Markers of Epistemic vs. Affective Stances: Desyoo vs. Zyanai" by
Naomi Hanaoka McGloin examines closely and compares two Japanese
sentence-final expressions, desyoo and zyanai, in the framework of text
analysis. The author shows that desyoo can be considered as a marker of
epistemic stance while zyanai can be viewed as a marker of affected
stance.
Haruko Minegishi Cook's "The Social Meanings of the Japanese Plain
Form" examines the use of the so-called plain form in Japanese in the
framework of discourse modality. It is concluded that the plain form
foregrounds an affect key if there is one; otherwise it foregrounds the
informational content. The author also finds that "occurrence of the
naked plain form in speech is not random in at least institutional
settings." It is also noted that intonation plays an important role in
interpreting social meaning.
The fourth paper in this part, "Listener Responses in Telephone and
Face-to-face Conversations: How do Non-verbal Behaviors Affect Japanese
and English Interactions?" by Hiroko Furo, investigates how nonverbal
cues, like gestures and head nods, affect social interaction by
exploring how frequently and at what points listener responses are
verbalized in telephone and face-to-face conversations. It also studies
how culture affects verbal and nonverbal listening behaviours by
comparing conversation in Japanese and American English. The author
finds that nonverbal cues affect Japanese and English conversations to
a similar degree.
Kaoru Horie and Kaori Taira's "Where Korean and Japanese Differ:
Modality vs. Discourse Modality" finds that modality systems in Korean
and Japanese are similar only superficially; at closer inspection they
exhibit remarkable difference. The authors sum up that modality meaning
related to propositional content is elaborately encoded in Korean,
whereas discourse modality is systematically manifested in Japanese.
"Demonstratives as Prospective Indexicals: ku and ce in Korean
Conversation" by Kyu-hyun Kim and Kyung-Hee Suh is a thorough study of
the functions of two demonstrative attributive words, ku and ce, which
are part of the demonstrative triad i/ku/ce. The paper explicates the
uses of the two forms when they are used as prospective indexicals and
highlights the differences between the two in an illuminating way that
both researchers and learners of Korean will find satisfying.
Maeri Megumi's "The Switching Between desu/masu Form and Plain Form:
From Perspective of Turn Construction" uses the methodology of
conversation analysis to examine a peculiar phenomenon in Japanese, the
switching from the so-called desu/masu forms to plain forms, in the
framework of the theory of politeness. The author explores the
empirical material and reaches interesting conclusions about the
situations in which speakers choose to switch from one register to
another and the importance of the social factors and implications, like
social status and sex of the speaker, whether they are speaking to a
specific person or giving a presentation to an audience, etc.
The last paper in this part, Emi Morita's "Stance Marking in the
Collaborative Completion of Sentences: Final Particles as Epistemic
Markers in Japanese," studies cases in which utterance completion
includes attitudinal markers in the shape of final particles, e.g. yo,
ne, yone. The author finds that speakers employ them to position
themselves as candidates for collaboration to various degrees.
Regarding final particles as markers of epistemic stance, the author
shows how using them in conversation a second speaker can claim
different degrees of authority.
Part III, Historical Linguistics and Grammaticalization, has the fewest
number of papers, seven. They are a welcome and refreshing addition to
a somewhat neglected subfield of Japanese and Korean linguistics.
The first paper in this part is Sang-Cheol Ahn's "A Dispersion Account
on Middle Korean Vowel Shifts." The author accounts for the processes,
usually referred to as "the Vowel Shift in Middle Korean" from the
perspectives of the Dispersion Theory in conjunction with the
postulates of the Optimality Theory (OT). The arguments are supported
by a body of correspondences between Middle Mongolian words and 15th
century Korean loanwords from Mongolian.
The next papers is "Genitive tu in OJ and Historical Changes of
Genitive Particles" by Yu Hirata. Using the methods of historical
linguistics the author charts the history of a specific linguistic
form, tu in Old Japanese (OJ), from Genitive marker (GEN) to Pronominal
Genitive (Pro-GEN) to Bound Pronominal (Bd-Pro) and then to Nominalizer
(NMZ) and Sentence Final Particle (SFP). The relationship with Korean
and its likely cognate, s, is also addressed.
In Minju Kim's "On the Emergence of Korean Concessive myense: Focusing
on the Grammaticalization of se" the history of the Korean clausal
connective myense is thoroughly explored. Examining the evidence from
phonology and linguistic change the author traces back the origin of
the linguistic form to the forms mye and se and also addresses the
issue of the status of se generally. The different forms in which the
element se is contained are accounted for in the grammaticalization
framework.
Kyoko Hirose Ohara's "From Relativization to Clause-linkage: A
Constructional Account of Japanese Internally Headed Relativization"
discusses the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the so-
called "concessive clause-linking constructions." She also proposes
that the Internally Headed Relativization (IHR) constructions (also
discussed in Matsuda's paper in Part V) may be reanalysed in Modern
Japanese as concessive clause-linking constructions. The evidence
points to the necessity to consider the diachronic data and the
grammaticalization processes when analysing and explaining Modern
Japanese grammar.
Kaoru Ohta's "Kakarimusubi and Focus Structure" is a paper that deals
with the so-called Kakarimusibi (KM) constructions in Old Japanese
(OJ). An analysis of the Focus interpretation of these and the Middle
Japanese (MJ) pseudocleft constructions is proposed in a general
formalist framework. The work uses synchronic rather than diachronic
approaches towards the language phenomena.
"Discourse, Grammaticalization, & Intonation: An Analysis of -ketun in
Korean" by Mee-Jeong Park and Sung-Ock S. Sohn is a study of the Korean
verbal suffix -ketun from a historical and grammaticalizational
perspective, as well as in a pragmatic context. Studying the interplay
of discourse and intonation in the usages of -ketun, the authors reach
insights about the discourse-based grammaticalization and the role of
intonation and tone features in language change.
"Kakari Musubi, Noda-constructions, and How Grammaticalization Theory
Meets Formal Grammar" by Wolfram Schaffar also looks at the so-called
Kakari Musubi constructions in Classical Japanese, like Ohta's paper
from this part. The author clarifies the notion of morphological
'focus' and 'background.' For the theoretical discussion data from a
variety of languages (including Tibeto-Burman and African) is brought
forward. In order to account for the Kakari Musubi constructions and
the origin and development of Modern Japanese Noda-constructions a
cyclic grammaticalization process with four steps is put forward.
Part IV, Phonetics and Phonology, unites eight papers covering a range
of topics in Japanese and Korean sound systems and prosody.
The part opens with a paper by one of the invited speakers, S.-Y.
Kuroda, "Rendaku." The author acknowledges the significance of McCawley
1968 in establishing the foundations of generative phonology of
Japanese. Then the author summarizes the facts and the interpretations
of the Japanese linguistic phenomenon rendaku, the voicing of voiceless
obstruents at the beginning of an internal component of a compound
word, and gives an elegant and comprehensive formal account of the
relevant part of Japanese phonology.
The next paper in this part is "Supporting Korean and Japanese on the
Internet: Web Standards, Unicode and National Character Encodings" by
Katsuhiko Momoi from Netscape Communications Corp. This paper is more
about writing systems and text processing rather than about phonetics
or phonology. It is very informative and gives answers to an awful lot
of questions about Korean, Japanese and Chinese IT support that often
appear on various dedicated mailing lists and discussion groups in
Japanese and Korean studies. It provides the reader with a lot of
useful information on encoding methods, fonts, character set standards,
input method editors, etc. It is good reference for the current
situation.
The third paper in this part is Timothy J. Vance's "Semantic
Bifurcation in Japanese Compound Verbs" investigates an interesting
phenomenon: the coexistence of compound verbs in Japanese with
alternation of the final mora of the first element with a mora
obstruent in parallel with the source form and the bifurcation of
meaning that accompanies this phenomenon. Insightful observations about
expressiveness and semantic diversification are made.
"Moraic Structure and Segment Duration in Korean" by Emily Curtis is an
elegant and comprehensive exposition of a production experiment that
tests the effects on vowel duration of various syllable and moraic
configurations. Korean is chosen as an appropriate language for such an
experiment and the findings are insightful about the interaction of the
moraic and the syllabic articulation of Korean.
Stuart Davis and Isao Ueda's "Mora Augmentation in Shizuoka Japanese"
is of great interest because it presents a not very well known feature
of the Shizuoka dialect of Japanese, mora augmentation in adjectival
emphasis. The very complex patterns of mora augmentation are accounted
for in a unified manner in the formal framework of Optimality Theory.
"Phonetic Duration of English /s/ and its borrowing in Korean" by
Soohee Kim and Emily Curtis deals with the issues of phonemic
adaptation of loanwords; in this case the focus is on the accommodation
in Korean of the English consonant /s/. The theoretical elaborations
are accompanied by two experiments, a production one and a perception
one, and the conclusions point to possible paths of future research in
that vein.
Byung-Jin Lim's "Local and Global Patterns of Temporal Compensations in
Korean" concentrates on the temporal compensatory interaction between
vowel length, aspiration, tension and voicing of consonants and
syllable structure in Korean. The study also finds that the interval
from consonant release to consonant release "shows relatively constant
values" and that is compared to the peculiarities of Korean traditional
orthography. The results confirm previous studies and also lead to some
new conclusions.
"Prosody and Information Structure in Japanese: A Case Study of Topic
Marker wa" by Kimiko Nakanishi is a study of the interface of prosody
and information structure. The author explores to what extent
phonological means express information structure. Two experiments and a
corpus study are conducted with the aim to examine the prosodic
patterns of the topic marker wa in two functions, thematic and
contrastive. The exposition is richly illustrated with charts that
visualize the findings.
Part V, Syntax and Semantics, contains fourteen papers that examine
questions of syntax.
The first paper in this part is "Information Unpackaging: A Constraint-
based Unified Grammar Approach to Topic-Focus Articulation" by Suk-Jin
Chang from Seoul National University. The approached subject is the
"topic-focus articulation" (TFA) of the sentence, a notion that comes
from the tradition of the Prague Linguistic Circle. This short but very
interesting paper concentrates on two subtopics: the interaction of the
stress (as a prosodic feature) with the TFA, and dialogue analysis from
the perspective of TFA. A special emphasis is put on the prosody-
pragmatics interface and its implications for the information analysis.
The framework is formalist, stemming from Head-driven Phrase Structure
Grammar, and is called Constraint-based Unified Grammar of Korean
(CUG/K). It has been developed by the same author in previous
publications (e.g. Chang 1994). The potential applications of this
innovative framework for the study of Korean, as well as Japanese, are
also mentioned.
Susumu Kuno's "NPI Licensing, O/Ga Alternation, Verb Raising and
Scrambling" revisits some widely discussed topics in the literature on
Japanese linguistics in the generative tradition, like the bracketing
of the potential and experiential constructions, the alternation of the
case markers O and Ga, case assignment, verb raising, Negative Polarity
Items (NPI). The proposed new insights are illuminating and convincing.
"Negative Polarity in Korean and Japanese" by Chungmin Lee is a
profound study of the distribution and development of NPIs and Free
Choice Items (FPI) in Japanese and Korean in an advanced generative
framework. A "unified solution of concession" is proposed that will
certainly be useful in examining similar phenomena in other languages
that share typological features with Japanese and Korean in this
respect.
Yoko Sugioka's "Incorporation vs. Modification in Deverbal Compounds"
examines the syntax of an interesting feature of Japanese morphology,
the deverbal compounds (VC) in the framework of the tradition of
Sugioka 1984. The paper illuminates the properties of the argument VCs
and adjunct VCs from different angles: semantic, syntactic,
phonological (especially interesting sections on accent patterns and
rendaku).
"Syntactic and Pragmatic Properties of the NPI Yekan in Korean" by Sae-
Youn Cho and Han-Gyu Lee is a thorough analysis of the syntactic
properties (in a generative framework) and the pragmatics of a specific
Negative Polarity Item in Korean. As the authors point out it is
essential to study such items individually and "more empirical research
is required." In this respect this is a pioneering paper.
"The Interpretation of Wh-elements in Conjoined Wh-questions" by
Sungeun Cho and Xuan Zhou is a short paper that examines in detail a
curious issue: while some conjoined wh-questions in languages like
English can be ambiguous, the conjoined wh-questions in languages like
Korean or Japanese are not. The phenomena are approached in a
minimalist framework.
In "Complex Predicate Formation and Argument Structure of Japanese V-V
Compounds" Thomas Gamerschlag gives an account of the grammar of a
subclass of Japanese verb compounds, namely the "lexical compound
verbs," characterized by the absence of complement-functor relation
between the two verbs in the compound. The proposed innovative analysis
is in the theoretical framework of Lexical Decomposition Grammar (LDG).
In "Nominative-Genitive Conversion Revisited" Ken Hiraiwa from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology re-examines the traditional
analysis (in the generative tradition) of Nominative-Genitive
Conversion (NGC) in Japanese and supplies a lot of evidence to show
that it is not very adequate and convincing. The author proposes a new
descriptive generalization of NGC in a minimalist framework that is of
higher adequacy.
"A 'Removal' Type of Negative Predicates" by Jieun Joe and Chungmin Lee
is yet another paper on negation in this book. This one is highly
theoretical. It establishes a new class of negative predicates, removal
predicates, and discusses in depth the kinds of removal predicates, as
well as their semantics, syntax and morphological characteristics.
Jong Sup Jun's "Semantic Co-Composition of the Korean Substantival
Nouns-ha(ta) Construction: Evidence for the Generative Lexicon"
explains the semantics of the verbal constructions with the "light
verb" hata in Korean. Using co-composition a device in the Generative
Lexicon (GL) theoretical framework, the author adequately describes the
corresponding facts in Korean and proposes a correlate in English.
Ae-Ryung Kim's "Two Positions of Korean Negation" is a profound study
of the two types of Korean verbal negative constructions, commonly
known as short-form negation and long-form negation. The author reviews
the existing analyses and proposes a new analysis of the constructions
and the status of the negation marker ani. The advantages of the
suggested hypothesis are convincingly demonstrated.
"Opacity in Japanese and Korean" by Ae-Ryung Kim and Yoshihisa Kitagawa
is a theoretical development of the notion of opacity (that is part of
the generative tradition since the 1970s) in a minimalist framework.
The authors introduce the notion of 'relativized opacity' and explore
its implications for Japanese and Korean, as well as some phenomena in
English.
"Intervention Effects are Focus Effects" by Shin-Sook Kim is an
interesting cross-linguistic study of interrogative and negative
constructions in a minimalist framework. Analysing NPIs in Korean as
focus phrases, the author argues that an Intervention Effect is
produced by focus phrases. Material from other languages, including
Hindi and German, is brought into consideration too.
Yuki Matsuda's " Event Sensitivity of Head-Internal Relatives in
Japanese" proposes an interesting semantic account of the Japanese
constructions known as Head-Internal Relative (HIR) clauses (they are
also discussed in Ohara's paper from Part II as Internally Headed
Relativization clauses (IHRC)). The novel analysis accounts for a lot
of problematic data. The advantage of this analysis is that it takes
into consideration the semantic properties of the HIR clauses and is
not purely syntactic.
There is a very carefully designed and useful index of topics at the
end of the book.
EVALUATION
It is very difficult for a single reviewer to evaluate forty-five
different papers who are written in different frameworks, follow
different traditions and refer to numerous publications. Inevitably, a
single person will be attracted to the ones that are close to their
research interests while other papers will be harder to follow and
understand. It will be almost impossible to evaluate them even-
handedly. Nevertheless, it can be definitely said that this volume's
papers are clearly written and are accessible to readers with general
specialist knowledge.
The book is an excellently edited and good-looking volume combining a
large number of papers that approach different issues in Japanese and
Korean linguistics from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The book
is a forum that presents the work and latest achievements of the
linguists who work in these fields at the universities in North America
with international contributions, especially from Japan and South
Korea. In the tradition of the Japanese/Korean Linguistics series
different papers often appear typographically different (different
fonts, sizes, alignment). Although they make the book look somewhat
uneven, these feature actually contribute to the perception that the
reader receives visual correspondences to the distinct voices of the
individual contributors. This is an accessible and readable book that
is highly recommendable for students and researchers, especially from
other regions of the world, who want to keep up with the newest
developments and enquiries in the scientific study of two important
East Asian languages, Japanese and Korean.
REFERENCES
Chang Suk-Jin. 1994. Thonghap Mwunqpeplon [Unified Grammar Theory].
Seoul: Seoul National University Press.
Jacobsen, Wesley M. 1999. Aspects of hypothetical meaning in Japanese
conditionals. Function and Structure, ed. A. Kamio and T. Takami, 83-
122. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
McCawley, James D. 1968. The Phonological Component of a Grammar of
Japanese. The Hague: Mouton.
O'Grady, William. 1991. Categories and Case: The Sentence Structure of
Korean. Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Sells, Peter. 1995. Korean and Japanese Morphology from a Lexical
Perspective. Linguistic Inquiry 26, 277-325.
Sugioka, Yoko. 1984. Interaction of Derivational Morphology and Syntax
in Japanese and English. PhD dissertation, U. Chicago. (Reprinted:
Garland, 1986).
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Spas Rangelov is a postgraduate research student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research interests include Korean and Japanese linguistics, general linguistics, morphological theory, foreign-language teaching. |
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