2009 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
New perspective on Chinese typological features based on syntax-phonology interface
| Project/Area Number |
19520360
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Linguistics
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| Research Institution | Kobe City University of Foreign Studies |
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Principal Investigator |
OTA Itsuku Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, 外国語学部, 教授 (40160494)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
LAMARRE Christine 東京大学, 総合文化研究科, 教授 (30240394)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2007 – 2009
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| Keywords | 文法化 / 語彙化 |
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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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