Descriptive and Theoretical Research on Cross-Linguistic Variations

本项目前三年的研究产生了一些意想不到的结果。特别重要的是项目负责人的以下发现。古日语中的完成助动词-tu和-nu在分布上与欧洲助动词HAVE和BE，尤其是荷兰语中的hebben和zijn有密切的对应关系，不仅在-tu/ hebben与及物动词/非否定词一起出现的核心情况下，在-nu/ zijn与被动物/非宾格一起出现的情况下，而且在以下特殊情况下：荷兰语中有一些及物动词，如FORGET和PASS，它们特别选择了zijn；古日语中也有一小类特殊的及物，其中有表示“忘记”和“通过”的动词。由于这被认为不太可能是偶然的，合理的结论是，-tu/-nu选择和hebben/zijn选择本质上是相同的现象，正是由于这种现象的本质，像FORGET这样的动词被认为是许多其他及物动词的例外。因此，助词选择是一种不局限于欧洲语言的现象，这一结论为助词选择理论中的一些重要问题提供了新的思路。项目负责人已经在日本和韩国的学术期刊（The APANESE GRAMMAR SOCIETY and LANGUAGE RESEARCH JOURNAL）上发表了两篇关于该主题的文章。;将在《东亚语言学杂志》（美国）上发表的一篇长文对这一主题和其他一些相关问题进行了最全面的讨论。项目负责人和研究者对词汇语义的各种问题进行了确证，并得出了一些实质性的结果，包括《蒙古语结果语的相同类型含义》，《英语语言学》19期，第366-391页（项目负责人撰写），《反诘和结果语：英语和德语之间的一些差异》，《语言学》40/5期，第961-986页（大也敏明撰写）。

Research during the, first three years of the present project has produced some unexpected results. Of particular importance is the following discovery, by the Project Leader. The perfect auxiliaries in Old Japanese, -tu and -nu, display a close distributional correspondence to the European auxiliaries HAVE and BE, particularly to hebben and zijn in Dutch, not only in the core cases where -tu/ hebben appear with transitives/ unergatives and -nu/ zijn with passives/ unaccusatives, but also in the following exceptional cases : Dutch is known to have a few transitive verbs, such as FORGET and PASS, which exceptionally select zijn ; Old Japanese also has a small class of exceptional transitives, among which are the verbs meaning FORGET and PASS. Since this is thought not likely to be accidental, the reasonable conclusions are that -tu/-nu selection and hebben/zijn selection are essentially the same phenomenon, and it is by the very nature of this phenomenon that verbs like FORGET are favored as exceptions aver many other transitive verbs. Auxiliary selection is therefore a phenomenon not confined to European languages -a conclusion which throws fresh light upon some important issues in the theory of auxiliary selection. The Project Leader has already published two articles on this subject in refereed journals in Japan and Korea (JOURNAL of THE APANESE GRAMMAR SOCIETY and LANGUAGE RESEARCH). ; the most comprehensive discussion of this subject and some other related matters are presented in a long paper which is to appear in JOURNAL of EAST ASIAN LINGUISTICS (U.S.A.)The Project Leader and the investigators corroborated on various issues in lexical semantics and produced some substantial results, including "Same Typological Implications of Mongolian Resultatives," ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 19, pp.366-391 (by the Project Leader) and "Reflexives and resultatives : some differences between English and German," LINGUISTICS 40/5, pp.961-986 (by Toshiaki OYA)