Activity Reports

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"Contrastive Study for Japanese and Other Languages" The 16th Research Seminar co-hosted by the Contrastive Japanese Division, International Japanese Education Division, International Center for Japanese Studies

14:00-17:40, Saturday, July 11, 2015
Sakura Hall, Japanese Language Center, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Fuchu Campus)

Lecturers:
Taro KAGEYAMA (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics)
"Language Typology and 2 Types of compound verbs"
　
Speakers:
Nobukatsu MINOURA (TUFS)"Verb Agreement in Madagascan Sign Language",
Hisae AKIHIRO (TUFS) "Subordinate Clauses in French"

Hisae AKIHIRO presented on 4 French conjunctions used in subordinate clauses to express causal relationships, car, comme, parce que and puisque.
She observed their function in effecting speech acts at the level of discourse grammar and the usage of various non-subordinate conjunctions with a high degree of independence from main clauses.

Nobukatsu MINOURA used video footage to contrast verb agreement in Japanese and Madagascan sign language.
In Japanese sign language, proactive verbs agree only with P and R clauses, while verbs of inversion agree only with A clauses.

In Madagascan sign language some proactive verbs also agree with A clauses.

Taro KAGEYAMA analyzed Japanese Verb+Verb type and Noun+Verb type compound verbs from the perspective of morphological typology.

In Japanese, the former are highly productive while the latter show little productivity, an effect of the asymmetry in the degree of morphological agglutination in predicate scope and noun scope.　