VERBAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN LANGUAGES:
INTERFACE BETWEEN COGNITIVE AND AREAL LINGUISTICS

A Theme Session to be held on Thursday, July 26, 2001 at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC 2001) in Santa Barbara, California.

Organizers:

Presenters:

Discussant:

Session Theme:

Cognitive linguistics has provided significant insights into the ways in which concepts and events are construed by lexical/syntactic structures. In this theme session, we propose to expand the field, by exploring various types of verbal constructions from the cognitive and functional points of view. We further propose to focus on languages from East and Southeast Asia in order to probe how areal and typological features may or may not interact with the cognitive structures.

East and Southeast Asian languages include languages from seven major language stocks; Japanese, Korean, Sinitic, Tai, Mon-Khmer, Hmong-Mien, and Austronesian. They also include languages of varying typological profiles; agglutinating languages (e.g. Japanese, Korean), isolating languages (e.g. Thai, Khmer, Mandarin Chinese), as well as those with mixed profiles like Austronesian languages; and verb final, medial and initial languages. Through careful observations of verbal constructions across languages with different typological and genetic profiles, and between languages of similar typological characteristics (e.g. Japanese and Korean), we will be able to approach a better understanding of the significance of cognitive perspective on language structure more clearly.

Six presenters will focus on such verbal constructions as resultative constructions, potential constructions, verbal noun constructions, motion verbs, and tense-aspect marking on verbs, in languages including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, and other languages from the region.

Theoretical issues addressed in the session range from re-examination of Talmy's framing typology, interface of structural and semantic configurations, cognitive typological implications of morpho-syntactic borrowing, areal features of grammaticalization pathways, and "functional transfer" across constructions.

Session Schedule:

2:00-2:05

Introduction: Toshio Ohori (University of Tokyo, Japan)

2:05-2:30

Toshio Ohori (University of Tokyo, Japan)
"More on the implications of framing typology: a view from East Asia"

2:30-2:55

Kingkarn Thepkanjana (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) and Satoshi Uehara (Tohoku University, Japan)
"Resultative constructions with verbs of "cleaning" in Thai and Japanese: a comparative study"

2:55-3:20

Shoichi Iwasaki (UCLA, USA)
"Functional transfer": a case study of the "potential" constructions in Japanese and Thai"

3:20-3:30

Discussion

3:30-4:00

Break

4:00-4:25

Kaoru Horie (Tohoku University, Japan)
"Verbal nouns in Japanese and Korean: cognitive typological implications"

4:25-4:50

Walter Bisang (University of Mainz, Germany)
"Language typology and grammaticalization - Tense/Aspect marking in the languages of East and mainland Southeast Asia between the lexicon, pragmatics and grammar"

4:50-5:15

Discussant: Masayoshi Shibatani (Kobe University, Japan, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, USA)

5:15-5:30

Genearl Discussion
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Date created: November 21, 2000

Date last updated: May 31, 2001