1996 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

COGNITIVE STUDIES OF CHINESE TYPOLOGY

Research Project

Project/Area Number	07610448
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	中国語・中国文学
Research Institution	KOBE UNIVERSITY,FACULTY OF CROSS-CULTURAL STUDIES
Principal Investigator	NASKAGAWA Masayuki KOBE UNIVERSITSITY,FACULTY OF CROSS-CULTURAL STUDIES,PROFESSOR, 国際文化学部, 教授 (80106781)
Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha)	KIMURA Hideki TOKYO UNIVERSITY,GRADUATE DEVISION OF INTERNATIONAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIE, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 助教授 (20153207)
Project Period (FY)	1995 – 1996
Keywords	TYPOLOGY / COGNITIVE / PERSPECTIVE / TIME AXIES / ASPECT / TENSE
Research Abstract	Japanese people have two different viewpoints. One represents a personal or inner world and the other an official or outer world. For example, there are two words for "future", one is ** and the other is . Chinese also has two words, and excepting that can be adverbial, there is no difference in meaning between these two words. In Japanese, is also adverbial and is noun. But more importantly in Japanese, indicates a future of someone and a future of, say, human beings or the world. There are other pairs constructed by reversing word order but which are not related to the view of the world, such as , . And they are used to differentiate concrete and abstract ideas. For example, means steps of a house and means steps of level. Historically, when the word "society" was first translated into Japanese, both and were used. And later came to mean, society and . In Chinese, both and were used at some period, but later became dominant and disappeared. But in Japan, means ancestors of an individual and ** means of human beings in general or of an ethnic group. In oreder to clarify such a difference between Chinese and Japanese. The conclusion is that Chinese perspective is narrower in varying degrees than that of Japanese regardless of time and space. And this might explain why Chinese did not develop Tense for an event placed along a time axis, yet developed Aspect when an event's development is the main concern.