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

本研究旨在探讨亚洲语言的地域性及其在认知语义结构中的普遍性。通过对不同亚洲语言的词汇和语法结构的分析，我们获取了不同地区的异同，并将其表达在一个通用语义网络系统的计算模型中。首先，我们从我们积累的数据中规定了我们在语言类型学和比较词汇学方面所获得的研究成果。然后从日韩电子文本和南亚语言书面文本构建了一个机器可读的标注语料库，用来系统地分析词汇和语法结构，指出尽管地理和类型上的距离，两种语言之间存在着系统的相似之处。在与脑科学家的合作中，我们还处理了语法现象的功能磁共振数据，作为认知/语义结构的地域性和普遍性的生物学基础。

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.