A comparative study on verbal affixes and auxiliary verbs as functional heads in Japanese and Korean

Abstract

It is true that languages differ, but they can only be different as the universal principles and parameters allow. Professor Hiroshi Aoyagi is interested in linguistic curiosities and the universality of language. He and his research team in Japan are investigating the possibility that proto-Korean and proto-Japonic languages branched off from a common source thousands of years ago. Japanese and Korean have grammatical similarities but the typological relationship between the two is yet to be determined. Aoyagi is seeking to substantiate the hypothesis of a common origin for the two languages and, in doing so, will contribute to the typology of the three major languages in the Far East: Japanese, Korean and Ryukyuan. In his 1999 book, Shiro Hattori stated that Korean may have a kinship relation with Japanese (next to Ryukyuan) and the two languages must have split more than 4,000 years ago. Aoyagi believes that this conjecture, if tenable, accounts for the presence of double causatives, the absence of the benefactive auxiliary verbs and the absence of exclusive/adversity use of the passive morphemes in Korean and Ryukyuan. His studies involve an explanation of the core morpho-syntactic characteristics of the Japanese and Korean languages. A similarity between Japanese and Korean is that they are both head-final agglutinative languages. Aoyagi will conduct a comparative study of how functional morphemes are combined in Japanese and Korean. In his work, he is using the principles and parameters approach proposed by Noam Chomsky; namely Universal Grammar (UG).