Activity Reports

It is an activity report of the center

The 7th Research Seminar "Contrastive Study for Japanese and Other Languages" (21 July 2012)

We, the Contrastive Japanese Division, have held the following research seminar as part of our project;
by Hideto Ito (TUFS)
"Korean and Japanese as seen from a typological perspective - nominalization in Korean language history - focusing on materials on loan word recording methodologies"
by Akio Ogawa (Kwansei Gakuin University)
"Dummy subject and its peripheral - German, other languages, and Japanese"
by Hiroto Ueda (The University of Tokyo)
"Trial of a new quantification in research in Spanish lexical variation across regions - A comparison with the Japanese dialectal geography method""

Saturday, 21 July 2012, 11:45 - 14:45

Ito analyzed nominalization found in materials of loan word recording methodologies from ancient Korean before the 10th century and 10 - 14th century early mid Korean, that is, Korean before the creation of Hangul. He showed that the restrictive modification and gerund forms were seen in the attributive form, and explained his interpretation of the attributive -r in early mid Korean expressing events that were realized in the potential and subjunctive worlds.

Ogawa argued that es in impersonal sentence constructions in German, usually seen as a dummy subject, makes a sentence complete not only syntactically, but also semantically and functionally because it expresses a meaning of "situation." He also tried to categorize other languages, including Japanese, by positioning the relevant expression in each language on the following axis: "zero subject - dummy subject - cognate construction - dummy predicate."

Ueda drew from the results of the VARILEX project "Spanish lexical variation," a lexical survey of 24 countries and 63 cities in the Spanish-speaking world, focused on "words of abuse" and compared the survey with several statistical processing methods. Based on his analysis, he claimed that the Spanish-speaking world can be divided into three groups using multi-lingual isopleths. (Takashi Narita)