Descriptive and Theoretical Research on Cross-Linguistic Variations

本项目头三年的研究取得了一些意想不到的结果。特别重要的是项目负责人的以下发现。古日语中的完美助词-tu和-nu与欧洲助词has和be有着密切的分布对应关系，特别是荷兰语中的hebben和zijn，不仅在核心情况下-tu/hebben与及物语/非作格动词一起出现，-nu/zijn与被动/非宾格动词一起出现，而且在以下例外情况下也是如此：荷兰语中有一些及物动词，如fort和pass，它们特别选择zijn；古日语也有一小类特殊的及物动词，其中包括表示忘记和通过的动词。由于这被认为不太可能是偶然的，合理的结论是-tu/-nu选择和hebben/zijn选择在本质上是相同的现象，正是由于这种现象的本质，像forget这样的动词作为例外受到了许多其他及物动词的青睐。因此，助词选择不仅是一种欧洲语言的现象--这一结论对助词选择理论中的一些重要问题有了新的认识。项目负责人已经在日本和韩国的参考期刊(APANESE语法学会和语言研究杂志)上发表了两篇关于这一主题的文章。该项目负责人和研究人员证实了词汇语义学中的各种问题，并产生了一些实质性的结果，包括“蒙古语结果词的相同类型含义”，“英语语言学”19，第366-391页(项目负责人)和“反义词和结果句：英语和德语之间的一些差异”，语言学40/5，第961-986页(由项目负责人撰写)。

Research during the, first three years of the present project has produced some unexpected results. Of particular importance is the following discovery, by the Project Leader. The perfect auxiliaries in Old Japanese, -tu and -nu, display a close distributional correspondence to the European auxiliaries HAVE and BE, particularly to hebben and zijn in Dutch, not only in the core cases where -tu/ hebben appear with transitives/ unergatives and -nu/ zijn with passives/ unaccusatives, but also in the following exceptional cases : Dutch is known to have a few transitive verbs, such as FORGET and PASS, which exceptionally select zijn ; Old Japanese also has a small class of exceptional transitives, among which are the verbs meaning FORGET and PASS. Since this is thought not likely to be accidental, the reasonable conclusions are that -tu/-nu selection and hebben/zijn selection are essentially the same phenomenon, and it is by the very nature of this phenomenon that verbs like FORGET are favored as exceptions aver many other transitive verbs. Auxiliary selection is therefore a phenomenon not confined to European languages -a conclusion which throws fresh light upon some important issues in the theory of auxiliary selection. The Project Leader has already published two articles on this subject in refereed journals in Japan and Korea (JOURNAL of THE APANESE GRAMMAR SOCIETY and LANGUAGE RESEARCH). ; the most comprehensive discussion of this subject and some other related matters are presented in a long paper which is to appear in JOURNAL of EAST ASIAN LINGUISTICS (U.S.A.)The Project Leader and the investigators corroborated on various issues in lexical semantics and produced some substantial results, including "Same Typological Implications of Mongolian Resultatives," ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 19, pp.366-391 (by the Project Leader) and "Reflexives and resultatives : some differences between English and German," LINGUISTICS 40/5, pp.961-986 (by Toshiaki OYA)