Summary

The goal of this project is to unravel the universals and cross-linguistic variations in the semantic structure of predicates through detailed cross-linguistic comparisons. In linguistic study, various semantic notions have been proposed to describe the semantic type of predicates such as transitivity, do-type/become-type description, affectivity, stage-level/individual-level description, perfective/durative/perfect, evidentiality, etc. In fact, these notions are not sufficient to describe the meanings of predicates in individual languages, and the interpretation of these notions varies from one language to another. Furthermore, the psychological reality of some of these notions has not been verified. In this project, the validity of these notions will be reexamined through detailed cross-linguistic comparisons.

This project consists of two research groups. The research of group 1 (leader: Masaru Inoue) aims to discover some of the cognitive foundations which determine the system of voice, tense, aspect and modality in individual languages through detailed comparisons of grammatical phenomena observed in Japanese (including dialects), Chinese and Korean. The research of group 2 (leader: Prashant Pardeshi) focuses on: (i) detailed description of the diversity attested in the encoding of non-canonical transitive events across languages, and unraveling areal patterns, if any; (ii) verifying the psychological reality of correlations between transitivity and notions such as intentionality, responsibility, and controllability, which are considered to be cognitive mechanisms motivating the transitive encoding of non-prototypical transitive events; and (iii) finding out to what extent verb types/valency classes are similar across Asian languages in terms of their syntactic properties.