A PARAMETRIC APPROACH TO SYNTACTIC AND PRAGMATIC COMPARISON OF JAPANESE,KOREAN AND ENGLISH

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The aim of the present research project is to find parameters involved in syntactic and pragmatic variations among languages. It is our claim that this can be best achieved by studying language variations among languages in the same typological group and comparing them with typologically distant languages. We have chosen Japanese and Korean as languages belonging to the former and compared the variations observed with the corresponding phenomena in English, a language typologically distant from the two languages.The syntacitic and pragmatic phenomena we studied are the following: 1. Case assignment system 2. Internal structure of noun phrases 3. system of pronominal anaphora 4. demonstratives and personal pronouns 5. discourse markers 6. conditionals We have shown the inter-relatedness of the phenomena listed above, thereby suggesting the possibility of explaining the language variations involved in terms of the difference in the setting of a small set of parameters.