Asian Linguistics Research Articles

Double-finite Serial Verbs in Sanskrit and later Indo-Aryan

Abstract Steever (1988. The serial verb formation in the Dravidian languages. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass) introduced to South Asian linguistics the notion “Serial Verb” – a Dravidian construction in which two morphologically finite verbs agree in person and number features in the same sentence. I show that similar “double-finite” structures are found in Sanskrit/Indo-Aryan, although details differ. One double-finite construction, inherited from Proto-Indo-European, does not seem to have continued in the post-Vedic language, but others do, and similar structures occur in Modern Indo-Aryan languages. While the historical developments are relatively clear for early Indo-Aryan, from Vedic down to Pāli, there are questions about whether the double-finite constructions of Modern Indo-Aryan are inherited , since comparable structures have not been noted in late Middle Indo-Aryan Apabhraṁśa, the near-ancestor of (peninsular) Modern Indo-Aryan. In the conclusion I discuss alternatives to Modern Indo-Aryan inheritance, including areal and typological factors and the proposal by Milizia (2018. Sul presente neoindoarico a doppio verbo finito. Atti del Sodalizio Glottologico Milanese 12(n.s.). 93–111) that the perhaps most widespread Modern Indo-Aryan double-finite construction results from analogical developments. (Unfortunately, the latter proposal does not account for the other Modern Indo-Aryan double-finite constructions.)

Biblical vocabulary of the Modern Literary Hindi language and its formation methods

The article displays the derivational methods of nouns and adjectives in the modern literary Hindi languge. The determination of the productivity of word-formation processes of the modern literary Hindi language is carried out on the basis of prefix, suffix, prefix-suffix methods of word-formation and stem-formation. To cover the topic of the proposed research, the author analyzes the scientific works of Ukrainian, European and Indian linguists to reveal the concepts of «derivational processes» in language, «biblicality» in linguistic culture. The scientists conclude that the lexical system of a language, including the biblical language, reflects the mentality and culture of a particular ethnic group and its perception of the world. The paper also considers the typological features of the word-formation methods of the modern literary Hindi language and offers the comparative characteristics of suffixes and prefixes, semantic and structural features of the biblical origin vocabulary based on the works of Ukrainian, European and Asian linguistics. The author finds out that the study of the biblical vocabulary of the modern literary Hindi language determines the national and cultural patterns of the Hindi speakers in India, Christians in particular, who use the biblical origin vocabulary in everyday life. The research establishes the most productive derivatives for the formation of nouns and adjectives, as well as active word-formation methods of nouns and adjectives of the biblical origin of the modern literary Hindi language. The scientific research identifies the main derivational methods of nouns and adjectives that have a systematic functioning in the biblical text of the modern literary Hindi language. The results of the research prove that the variety of prefixes and suffixes of the Bible lexicon in the modern literary Hindi language indicates its dynamic development.

Conditional conjunctions informed by Japanese and Korean

Abstract Many languages assign additional conditional interpretations to apparently regular sentential conjunctions (conditional conjunctions, CCs). Following previous ideas (Kaufmann, Magdalena. 2018. Topics in conditional conjunctions. Invited talk at NELS, vol. 49. Cornell University; Starr, Will. 2018. Conjoining imperatives and declaratives. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. 1159–1176), we provide additional support for the hypothesis that CCs involve topicalized first conjuncts. We argue that Japanese and Korean, which appear to lack CCs, in fact mark them quite transparently. Both languages combine sentential conjunctions with topic markers: Japanese -te=wa (standardly considered one of the language’s conditional connectives) and Korean -ko=nun (occurring naturally, not discussed in the literature). We show that Japanese conditional =to fits into the pattern of CCs as well: it is derived by topicalization of conjunctive =to. Conjunctive =to is normally restricted to NPs, but it can coordinate finite clauses so long as the finite verb does not precede =to (Koizumi, Masatoshi. 2000. String vacuous overt verb raising. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 9(3). 227–285). We argue that this requirement can be met in a topicalized clause carrying default tense; the resultant configuration is the conditional connective =to. Semantically, CCs are known to be more restricted than if-conditionals in not readily realizing epistemic conditionals. The elements -te=wa, =to, and -ko=nun are all subject to exactly this restriction, which we refine to exclude only non-predictive epistemics. Following the transparent structure in Japanese and Korean, we interpret CCs by predicating the regular conjunction distributively of the set of (contextually salient and epistemically accessible) situations described by the topicalized first conjunct. We argue that apparent cases of focus on or within the first conjunct of CCs constitute contrastive topics or corrections.

Political discourse from the standpoint of the addressee

This article is an overview of West-European and Asian linguistic discussion of the issue of the addressee as one of the key components of political discourse. It considers the concept of political discourse addressee as well as the issue of speech influence and discourse manipulation since the latter is the most important characteristic of the type of discourse under consideration. To date, actualization of the addressee in political discourse is not sufficiently studied; hence, there is a respective gap in political discourse studies. This conclusion is made upon reviewing modern trends in political discourse research in West-European and Asian linguistics, critical discourse analysis being the major and the most representative of them, with the contribution of political discourse analysis and critical applied linguistics. The overview shows that the linguistic trends listed above have contributed greatly into the study of discourse, in general, and political discourse, in particular. The article also demonstrates the results of the study of political discourse addressee as groups of voters, conducted in papers on communication theory and PR-practices and argues that such approach appears insufficient as it must be augmented by the study of the addressee in terms of cognitive linguistics. This paper concludes that an addressee of political discourse is not in the focus of modern West-European linguistics and thus requires further in-depth analysis, which can be done by applying the communicative-cognitive approach in its multimodal aspect.

Expanding the boundaries of Asian linguistics

AbstractWhile the general lines of the areal linguistic typology of Asia are well known, there are some less well understood pockets that promise to throw light on the overall range of variation within the continent. These include the indigenous languages of the Andaman Islands, which have for much of history stood apart from the population and language spreads that have characterized most of Asia. They fall into two families: Great Andamanese – the focus of this article – and Ongan. In some respects Great Andamanese languages go with the bulk of Asia, e.g. verb-final constituent order, but other aspects even of constituent order represent a mixture that matches neither the general Asian head-final type nor the Southeast Asian head-initial type. Some properties of Great Andamanese are typologically unusual, but do find presumably accidental parallels in languages spoken inside Asia, e.g. retroflex consonants, or elsewhere, e.g. body-part prefixes and verb root ellipsis.

Referentiality, individuation and incompletive readings

As an exception to Krifka’s (in: Bartsch, Benthem, Emde Boas,Semantics and contextual expression, CSLI Publications, Stanford, 1989) famous generalization that a quantized incremental theme always induces an event-homomorphic completive reading, Singh (Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 17(1): 469–479, 1991, Journal of East Asian Linguistics 3(2): 107–146, 1998) observes that in Hindi only quantized mass noun phrases entail a completive reading, but unexpectedly quantized count noun phrases can give rise to an incompletive reading. She proposes that count nouns can introduce a partial-affectedness thematic relation, whereas mass nouns introduce a total-affectedness thematic relation. With new data in Mandarin, instead of the count/mass distinction, I argue that referentiality of the direct object is a crucial factor, because incompletive readings are only felicitous with direct objects interpreted referentially for consumption verbs in Mandarin.

Topics in theoretical Asian linguistics: Studies in honor of John B. Whitman

Topics in theoretical Asian linguistics: Studies in honor of John B. Whitman

Report on the 26th annual meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society

Report on the 26th annual meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society

Interaction between aspiration and tonal pitch in Weihai Chinese

This paper considers the questions of whether, how, and by what mechanism the aspiration of voiceless stops in the syllable onset affects the pitch (F0) of lexical tone in a tone language. The literature on this topic is at odds with itself. Lai et al. [“The raising effect of aspirated prevocalic consonants on F0 in Taiwanese,” Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on East Asian Linguistics (2009)] review the history of conflicting results, with some studies reporting F0 lowering after aspirated stops, and some reporting F0 raising. Here is provided another battery of findings from another tonal dialect, Weihai Chinese. Using data from seven monodialectal female speakers, no effect of aspiration is found on tonal F0 following bilabial or alveolar stops, but a strong significant lowering effect was observed following the velar aspirated stops. A second issue addressed here has had almost nothing published about it, viz., what is the converse effect of the lexical tone pitch upon the aspiration time (VOT) of the onset stops. It was found that, in general, high-beginning tones correlated with shorter voice onset times in all stop onsets.

Minimalist Interfaces: Evidence from Indonesian and Javanese by Yosuke Sato

Reviewed by: Minimalist Interfaces: Evidence from Indonesian and Javanese by Yosuke Sato Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine Yosuke Sato. 2010. Minimalist Interfaces: Evidence from Indonesian and Javanese. Linguistik Aktuell 155. xiii + 159. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 978-902-72-5538-9. €95, US$143, hardcover. Puzzles do not exist in a vacuum. Empirical observations rise to the level of puzzles only when cast against a particular theoretical backdrop. Their careful investigation, then, has the potential to elucidate not only the nature of particular linguistic phenomena, but also aspects of the design of the human language faculty itself. This stance is apparent in Yosuke Sato’s 2010 monograph, based on his 2008 University of Arizona doctoral dissertation, which studies four aspects of the grammar of Indonesian and Javanese and highlights their theoretical relevance within the framework of the Minimalist Program and to more general questions of grammatical architecture. The book is structured around these four case studies—on reduplication, active voice deletion, preposition-stranding sluicing, and nominal interpretation—with brief introduction and conclusion chapters that provide a theoretical framing.1 The title of this volume makes reference to Sato’s Minimalist Interfaces thesis, the idea that syntax proper is “functionally blind,” constructing complex syntactic objects “without ever caring about the fate of the objects thus created, leaving the task of their convergence/interpretability entirely to the language-external, sound- and meaning-related modules” (2). At both the sound- and meaning-related interfaces, a set of “domain-specific operations … legitimatize otherwise illicit objects created by syntax” (1). As made explicit in the conclusion, this view of the interfaces differs from common and influential “filtration” models of the interfaces (Chomsky and Lasnik 1977, among many others): “the role of the interfaces is not to constrain the forms of objects created by the syntactic derivation; they work instead to improve them” (134). Under this framework, it is, then, essential to investigate the inventory of such possible improvement strategies at the interfaces. Save for a few references to this overarching Minimalist Interfaces thesis in the introduction or conclusion of a chapter, each chapter is self-contained, presenting its own relevant background and terms as necessary. The book reads as a collection of four papers, and this is not an accident—versions of three of the four content chapters have by now appeared elsewhere as independent journal articles. I will, therefore, begin with a summary and evaluation of each individual case study chapter and then return to these questions regarding the entire book and its themes as a whole. [End Page 298] Ch. 2, “Reduplication asymmetries at the syntax-lexicon interface,” studies patterns of reduplication in Indonesian nouns and verbs, and is a revised version of Sato (2009) in the Journal of the South East Asian Linguistics Society. The chapter argues that reduplication in Indonesian must be sensitive to the internal derivational structure of words, which is incompatible with Lexicalism, the idea that words are formed in an independent morphology or lexicon module and are then used as atoms in syntax, as well as weaker forms of Lexicalism where irregular, unproductive morphology must be computed in the lexicon, before syntax. The chapter gives a brief survey of different conceptions of Lexicalism, as well as a brief introduction to a specific non-Lexicalist theory, Distributed Morphology, which is adopted in his proposal. What is shown to be specifically problematic for many of the Lexicalist theories considered is the ordering of reduplication and affixation in cases where reduplication has applied word-internally. Consider the example of buah-buahan ‘many types of fruit’ derived from the stem buah ‘fruit’. The reduplication of the nominal stem buah-buah is a phonologically regular process with a transparent semantics of marked pluralization, which would be considered a type of inflectional morphology. The form buah-buahan, then, must either be the result of this inflectional morphology followed by the derivational morphology -an, or there would have to be an inflectional process of reduplication which reaches inside the already complex buahan and reduplicates just the stem, forming buahbuahan. This is problematic for those Lexicalist theories that strictly order derivational morphology before inflectional morphology, or treat derivational morphology in the lexicon and productive inflectional morphology in syntax...

Report on the 25th Southeast Asian Linguistics Society Conference, Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Report on the 25th Southeast Asian Linguistics Society Conference, Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Yamuna Kachru's contributions to South Asian discourse and convergence studies

ABSTRACTThe range of Yamuna Kachru's publications is tremendously broad, ranging from language pedagogy, to South Asian – especially Hindi – syntax and syntactic typology, to discourse in South Asian and other languages, to the broader issue of South Asia and world Englishes. This paper focuses on a number of those aspects of her work that have stimulated my own work on several facets of South Asian linguistics, and presents a personal perspective on Professor Kachru's work in this arena.

Yamuna Kachru and world Englishes

ABSTRACTProfessor Yamuna Kachru brought an enormous energy and commitment to the world Englishes (WE) enterprise over three decades. Her research and publications were characterized by a unique intelligence, informed by her expert knowledge of South Asian linguistics, as well as a lively and curious intellect fascinated by many other aspects of language studies. Her contribution to world Englishes was lucidly informed by her own experiences of India and by her deep and comprehensive research on South Asian languages. The arc of her research career can be traced from South Asian linguistics through contrastive discourse analysis to a wide variety of research and publications on world Englishes, about which she co‐authored three volumes, and published more than forty research papers. Her work continues to serve as an inspiration for WE scholars and students throughout the world.

With admiration, gratitude, and deep respect: In honor of Professor Yamuna Kachru (1933–2013)

ABSTRACTProfessor Yamuna Kachru spent her early years in India, where she completed her BA and MA studies in Hindi language and literature, as well as a Diploma in Linguistics. She went to the UK in 1959, where she taught at SOAS, and completed her PhD. In 1965 she moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign to join her husband Professor Braj B. Kachru in the Linguistics Department. Over the course of her career she published an impressive body of work that included research on South Asian linguistics, Hindi language studies, applied linguistics, Asian Englishes, contrastive rhetoric, discourse analysis, and cross‐cultural communication. Her many awards include the Presidential Award for her research and publications on Hindi linguistics, which she received from the President of India in 2006. The collection of papers in this special issue pays tribute to her life and work, with much admiration, gratitude and deep respect.

Different Durations of Diphthongs in Thai: a New Finding

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian Linguistics (2002)

Contact induced variation and syntactic change in the Tsat of Hainan

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian Linguistics (2002)

State-of-the-art in the documentation of the Papuan languages of Timor, Alor, Pantar, and Kisar; A bibliography

The Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) language family has a special place in South-East Asian linguistics; its members make up the western extreme of the Papuan language sphere. Along with an exhaustive bibliography of works on the TAP languages, this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the ongoing documentation of the TAP language family in terms of both linguistic description and (pre-)historical reconstruction. The paper concludes with a consideration of the prospects for future studies of the TAP languages.

Foreword

In line with the journal policy, the present issue of ALA, the last this year, also includes also a paper in Slovene. While striving for an active, open and engaged dialogue with the scientific trends in the research of Asian languages around the world, ALA, as the sole scientific journal devoted to Asian linguistics in Slovenia, also has set before itself the goal to cultivate critical scientific thought and terminology in this field among Slovenian speakers by providing in one of the issues every year also research and technical articles in Slovenian, for the Slovenian reading public, above all for undergraduate students and the interested public at large. This has been a tradition and, I would say, also a duty, respected and eagerly put in practice by those of us who do science, including linguistics, in the context of a relatively small language community, that of Slovenian speakers.The present issue begins with two papers concerned with the perception of phonological and phonetic differences between languages.The first paper, by Ashima AGGARWAL, deals with the acquisition of Hindi voicing and aspiration contrasts by monolingual English speakers in the framework of Optimality theory. The main result, that English learners do perceive aspiration distinction but not voicing contrast, also bears on adult learning of second languages in general.In the second paper, Nina GOLOB examines differences in Japanese and Slovene prosody i.e., accent and intonation, from a phonological point of view. The study shows that there are phonological differences behind some superficial phonetic similarities in the examined phenomena, which represent a difficulty in the acquisition of L2 prosody.In the next paper, Abolfazl MOSAFFA JAHROMI examines the syntactic behaviour of in, an expletive-like morpheme in Persian, and argues in favour of the existence of expletives in Persian, a language which has hitherto generally been considered to have no expletives.The fourth and fifth paper deal with categorisations. The fourth paper deals with typological categorisation based on event framing strategies in Old Chinese and Old Japanese. On the basis of an analysis of available data, Wenchao LI concludes that while Old Chinese employed verb framing, satellite framing and equipollent framing, verb framing was its main pattern, while in Old Japanese all three patterns were employed comparably.The fifth paper, by Sumi YOON, deals with discourse categorisation of Japanese and Korean, both generally considered as “listener-responsible” languages. By analysing apologies in conversations by Japanese and Korean students, both those in their home country and those studying in the US, the author argues for a recategorization of Korean as a “speaker-responsible language”.In the technical article, in Slovene, at the end of this issue, Andrej BEKEŠ investigates the classification of genres in Japanese corpora, based on recent research he has also been involved in. He argues that various modal expressions, such as suppositional adverbs, may provide an interesting base for such classification.

State-of-the-art in the documentation of the Papuan languages of Timor, Alor, Pantar, and Kisar; A bibliography

The Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) language family has a special place in South-East Asian linguistics; its members make up the western extreme of the Papuan language sphere. Along with an exhaustive bibliography of works on the TAP languages, this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the ongoing documentation of the TAP language family in terms of both linguistic description and (pre-)historical reconstruction. The paper concludes with a consideration of the prospects for future studies of the TAP languages.

Real parasitic gaps in Japanese

This paper aims to demonstrate that there exist real parasitic gaps (PG) in Japanese, despite the fact that pro is available rather freely in this language, hence making it hard to unveil the existence of real PGs. Taking up Takahashi’s (J East Asian Linguistics 15: 1–35, 2006) work as the starting point, I argue that as far as NP gaps are concerned, what Takahashi calls an apparent PG is identified as either a real PG or an instance of pro, contrary to Takahashi’s claim that it involves argument ellipsis. Real PG cases are found in typical PG configurations where sloppy readings of zibun ‘self’ are involved and where reconstruction effects of Condition A take place into PGs. I further argue that the argument-ellipsis strategy is unavailable in the apparent PG configuration due to its last resort nature. This property restricts the availability of argument ellipsis to the configuration in which the elliptic site is not c-commanded by its antecedent or it is not an NP in categorial status.