A Fundamental and Empirical Study of the Influence of East Asian Cultures on the Grammaticalization Patterns of East Asian Languages

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From the perspective incorporating the insights of sociolinguistcs, pragmatics, politeness theory, and linguistic anthropology, Principal Investigator (Sachiko Ide) has explored an intricate interrelationship between linguistic ideologies unique to East Asian communities, on the one hand, and grammatical phenomena characteristically observed in these communities (e.g. sociolinguistic constraints on the use of personal pronouns, grammaticalized honorifics, sentence-final particles and back-channle behavior frequent in conversational discourse). Ide organized three international workshops investigating the relationship between cultural values (e.g. "harmony") and language use (e.g. sentence-final particles, backchannels) at Japan Woman's University and lectured on her theoretical findings at various international conferences and symposiums (e.g. International Pragmatics Association) as a keynote or invited speaker. Furthermore, as the director of the language planning commission on the use of language, Ide was principally involved in submitting a proposal entitled "Linguistic Politeness for the New Age".From the perspective of linguistic typology and cognitive-functional linguistics, Investigator (Kaoru Horie) analyzed the grammaticalization patterns in East Asian languages. Specifically, Horie found that Japanese tends to show one-to-many or many-to-one correspondence between form (structure) and meaning, whereas Korean tends to exhibit one-to-one form-meaning mapping more rigidly. Horie argued that this contrast is correlated with the differential cultural-communicative practices in two linguistic communities. Horie presented the research findings at various international conferences (e.g. International Cognitive Linguistic Association, International Circle of Korean Linguistics. Conference on Conceptual Structure, Language, and Discourse, Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conferene).