Transitivity alternation and grammatical relations in the languages around Hokkaido

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 22520405
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Sapporo Gakuin University
• Principal Investigator: SASAKI Kan 札幌学院大学, 経営学部, 教授 (80312784)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): OKUDA Osami 札幌学院大学, 人文学部, 教授 (60224151) ; SHIRAISHI Hidetoshi 札幌学院大学, 経済学部, 教授 (10405631)
• Project Period (FY): 2010-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 他動性交替 / 使役 / 逆使役 / 地域特徴 / 再帰 / アイヌ語 / ニヴフ語 / 日本語方言

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Through this project we collected and analyzed data concerning the transitivity alternation in Hokkaido Japanese, Tohoku Japanese, Ainu and Nivkh. As a consequence, we clarified that the northern Japanese dialects, Ainu and Nivkh share the property that transitivity alternation using productive morphology is bi-directional although these languages differ with respect to the lexical transitivity alternation. The Japanese dialects spoken outside Hokkaido and Tohoku have only productive causativization but they lack productive anticausativization. This asymmetry found in Japanese dialects indicates that the commonality among the languages around Hokkaido can be regarded as an instance of an areal feature. The result of research was published in 2014 in Japan. In 2015, we will make a presentation at an international conference.

Free Research Field

言語学