Studies in the voice systems of Japanese dialects from crosslinguistic perspective

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In this project, I was able to collect data regarding the spontaneous construction from two sources, a survey and automatic collection of dialectal forms through an online search program. The survey concerning the conditions of use for the spontaneous construction was carried out at universities in Hokkaido and Aomori in 2005. The analysis of the results from the survey indicated that the condition for the use of a spontaneous form with anticausative interpretation corresponding to a transitive verb is that the transitive verb in question exhibits the aspectual properties of an accomplishment at phrase level. An article contrasting the standard Japanese transitivity alternation with the alternation between transitive verbs and the corresponding anticausative spontaneous forms in the Hokkaido dialect was published in the volume "Across-linguistic investigation of transitivity". An online search carried out in 2007 in order to verify the frequency of unelicited use of the spontaneous construction by Hokkaido dialect speakers revealed that the construction is used with high frequency. In order to collect a large corpus of unelicited forms I set up (in my office) a server using search program based on Yahoo Japan's APL Through the search program I have already collected over 200,000 examples of the relevant construction. These data were partly examined and the preliminary results are published in the research report. The written materials resulting from the present research were published in a report bulletin at the end of the year The bulletin includes both materials previously published in journals or books, and unpublished materials.