| Budget Amount *help |
¥4,420,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥1,020,000)
Fiscal Year 2009: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000、Indirect Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 2008: ¥1,430,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥330,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥1,690,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000、Indirect Cost: ¥390,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Chinese (the term designs here the Sinitic languages spoken by the Han people) is typologically characterized as a typical isolating language. Consequently, phenomena such as morphologization, which characterize languages that are not isolating, have remained largely understudied. This project deals with morpho-phonological changes such as rime change in verbs and nouns, analyzes their linguistic functions and the various mechanisms that led to their development. Our analysis is based both on the systematic survey of second-hand data and on first-hand data gathered during our own field-work. We argue that there are in some Chinese dialects phenomena such as phonetic weakening and syllable coalescence, which reflect a high degree of morphologization and grammaticalization, in a way which is quite similar to non-analytic languages.
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