On "natural wording" in Japanese and Russian: An aspect-voice cognitive typological study

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24520472
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: SOEJIMA Kensaku 東北大学, 高度教養教育・学生支援機構, 准教授 (60347135)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: アスペクト・ヴォイス / 言語の「自然さ」，「-語らしさ」 / 日露対照研究 / 認知類型論 / パラレルコーパス

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In this study, I have first created a Japanese - Russian parallel corpus, based on the text of short stories. In total there are 9 corpora: 7 from Japanese text and 2 from Russian text. It has been specifically formatted for a side-by-side comparison.
This study considers the question of how we express intentional events involving an agent that is unspecified or unimportant. To answer this question, data were collected from the above-mentioned parallel corpora. After collection, the data were analyzed in detail to determine why these differences occur. In additional, I investigated the results of an awareness survey of those representations, in advanced Japanese learners. The difference between Japanese and Russian lies in the different ways of rendering for each language, that is, whether or not a speaker seizes and depicts events subjectively from the view point of the patient. The results of the study show that Japanese is a language with a high degree of subjectivity.

Free Research Field

言語学　日本語教育