A Cognitive and Functional Linguistic Study on Directionality of Diachronic Changes in Grammatical and Lexical Structures Focusing on Japanese and Korean.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The purpose of this study was to find out regularities in the development of grammatical and lexical structures with special reference to Japanese and Korean. We mainly focused on modal auxiliaries, negation, and continuative aspect adverbs.On modal auxiliaries, we have found that although modal auxiliaries in English and its related languages show developments from deontic to epistemic senses, we cannot find the same directionality in Japanese and Korean. In fact epistemic meanings seem to have been predominant in modal auxiliaries in Old Japanese and they became disambiguated in the course of development. The same is arguably true of Korean. We argued that such difference in directionality of development derives from the difference in source categories of modal auxiliaries. We also argued that cultural-typological factor may also be involved in the disambiguation patterns in Japanese and Korean modal auxiliaries.As for negation, we have shown that while Korean sentential negation developed along the line of Jespersen's cycle, Japanese sentential negation does not show the similar cyclic pattern of development. This is due to the difference in source categories of sentence negators. As Korean recruited an adverbial element, its position is more likely to be affected by functional considerations. On the other hand, as Japanese negator was originally a predicate and Japanese language is rigidly verb-final, it was very unlikely to undergo change of positions or roles according to Jespersen's cycle.Finally, we have pointed out that semantic extension of mada in Japanese and still in English is different and this difference is caused by the difference in the type of meaning original words express. We have also shown that this difference can explain a variety of time-relationship adverb systems not only in Japanese and English, but also in Korean and German.