Regionality of Asian languages and their universality in cognitive-semantic structures

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This study is an investigation into regionality of Asian languages and their universality in cognitive-semantic structures. Through analysis of lexical and grammatical structures of various Asian languages we capture regional similarities and differences and express it in a computational model of universal semantic network system. First, we stipulate from the data we accumulated what we have obtained in our previous studies in linguistic typology and comparative lexicology. Then we also construct a machine readable tagged corpus from electronic text of Japanese and Korean and written text of South Asian languages, which is utilized to systematically analyze lexical and grammatical structures and to point out existing systematic similarities among the languages in spite of the geographical and typological distance. In collaboration with brain scientists we also deal with fMRI data of grammatical phenomena as a biological foundation of regionality and universality of cognitive/semantic structures.