Buckeye East Asian Linguistics 3 (BEAL 3)

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https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/86760

The ten short entries published in this third volume of Buckeye East Asian Linguistics are based on abstracts that were accepted for the 2nd Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Forum, which included two keynote speeches and 19 poster presentations delivered on Friday, October 21, 2016 at The Ohio State University (OSU) Columbus campus (http://u.osu.edu/beal/).

ISSN 2378-9387

Front Matter
pp. i-iv
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'De-inflectionalization' of Japanese Adjectives and Watkins' Law in Indo-European: A Comparison
Bowman, Frederick pp. 1-10
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Japanese Particle i: A Study in Early Middle Japanese
Bundschuh, John pp. 11-20
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Analysis of Intermediate Chinese Learners' Persistent Errors in the Production of Tone 2 in Mandarin Chinese
Cornelius, Crista; Mu, Bing pp. 21-30
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Talking like a Shōnen Hero: Masculinity in Post-Bubble Era Japan through the Lens of Boku and Ore
Dahlberg-Dodd, Hannah E. pp. 31-42
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The Existence of Pseudoclefts in Japanese
Harada, Masashi pp. 43-52
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Perception of Sound Symbolism in Mimetic Stimuli: The Voicing Contrast in Japanese and English
Nakata, Kotoko pp. 53-63
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Identifying Co-reference of Zibun and Caki: The Case of Reflexives in Japanese and Korean
Li, Noriyasu; Juffs, Alan pp. 64-74
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Context Dependency of Bare Gradable Adjective Predicates in Mandarin Chinese
Wang, Qian pp. 75-84
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Predictions of Entropy Reduction Theory on Chinese Relative Clauses
Zhang, Borui pp. 85-94
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A Contrast of L1 Pronominal Usage: Japanese and Mandarin in Oral Narratives
Zhang, Ying pp. 95-104
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Front Matter (Volume 3, 2018)
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10)
'De-inflectionalization' of Japanese Adjectives and Watkins' Law in Indo-European: A Comparison
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Bowman, Frederick
So-called 'de-inflectionalization' of adjectives is a familiar phenomenon in modern Japanese dialects spoken e.g. in Kyūshū and Tōhoku. Recent work has however pointed out that the term 'de-inflectionalization' is problematic, and has proposed that instead a fusion of adjectival root plus an inflectional morpheme has been reanalyzed as a new root, which becomes generalized through the paradigm. This paper takes this analysis of the changes seen in these adjectives as a starting point and endeavors to resolve difficulties in the data by recourse to a comparison with a complex of changes commonly seen in Indo-European languages and collectively known as 'Watkins' Law.'
Japanese Particle i: A Study in Early Middle Japanese
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Bundschuh, John
The meaning of early Japanese particle i remains contested. It is most often described in the kokugogaku tradition as an 'emphatic' particle, but has also been analyzed as an accusative marker, active marker, nominalizing suffix, nominative marker, demonstrative pronoun, and a quasi-free noun meaning 'person' or 'thing'. However, the above conclusions are drawn from particle i's quite limited use in Old Japanese (OJ), since it was thereafter restricted to kundokugo, the linguistic variety used in Japanese renderings of Sinitic texts. Whitman & Yanagida (2012) examine i in Early Middle Japanese kundokugo sources, concluding it acts as a broad focus particle after indeclinable noun phrases. This study however, supplies evidence that the focus and emphasis often noted of particle i can be attributed to its being a bound referential pronominal used to increase the specificity and referentiality of the marked noun phrase.
Analysis of Intermediate Chinese Learners' Persistent Errors in the Production of Tone 2 in Mandarin Chinese
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Cornelius, Crista; Mu, Bing
This study examines the persistent errors of intermediate-level Chinese language learners in the production of Tone 2. Four Chinese native speakers' production of Tone 2 in isolation and in each of its possible tone combinations in bi-syllabic words serves as a point of comparison for the analysis of the production of the same tokens of Tone 2 by four intermediate-level learners of Chinese. The analysis specifically focuses on comparing the pitch contour of non-native speakers with native speakers of Mandarin. Different pitch contours for non-native speaker production of Tone 2 are identified and evaluated. The results of this study challenge teachers and textbook writers to re-consider how tones are visually represented to students and suggest pedagogical interventions for intermediate-level students with persistent Tone 2 errors.
Talking like a Shōnen Hero: Masculinity in Post-Bubble Era Japan through the Lens of Boku and Ore
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Dahlberg-Dodd, Hannah E.
Comics (manga) and their animated counterparts (anime) are ubiquitous in Japanese popular culture, but rarely is the language used within them the subject of linguistic inquiry. This study aims to address part of this gap by analyzing nearly 40 years' worth of shōnen anime, which is targeted predominately at adolescent boys. In the early- and mid-20th century, male protagonists saw a shift in first-person pronoun usage. Pre-war, protagonists used boku, but beginning with the post-war Economic Miracle, shōnen protagonists used ore, a change that reflected a shift in hegemonic masculinity to the salaryman model. This study illustrates that a similar change can be seen in the late-20th century. With the economic downturn, salaryman masculinity began to be questioned, though did not completely lose its hegemonic status. This is reflected in shōnen works as a reintroduction of boku as a first-person pronoun option for protagonists beginning in the late 90s.
The Existence of Pseudoclefts in Japanese
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Harada, Masashi
This paper demonstrates that Japanese also has pseudocleft constructions that correspond to pseudoclefts in English. Despite the term pseudocleft being well known in the Japanese literature, the existence of the construction has been assumed without much justification. Thus, this paper demonstrates its existence based on two defining properties of pseudoclefts that are often adopted in the literature. In so doing, this paper also proposes a new structure of the grammatical subject of Japanese pseudoclefts. Interestingly, this paper concludes that the subject is a relative construction headed by a phonologically null noun. In addition, this paper may contribute to the study of constructions related to Japanese pseudoclefts such as conventional copular sentences, clefts, and some clausal elliptical constructions.
Perception of Sound Symbolism in Mimetic Stimuli: The Voicing Contrast in Japanese and English
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Nakata, Kotoko
The current study investigated sound symbolism in Japanese mimetic stimuli. We examined whether the voicing contrast in consonants (/d, g, z/ vs. /t, k, s/) affects perception both in Japanese native speakers and in English native speakers. Stimuli were evaluated on 4 different dimensions: size (big-small), shape (round-spiky), and two evaluative dimensions (good-bad, graceful-clumsy). The voicing on the stimuli was manipulated, creating a continuum from voiced to voiceless endpoints in order to examine the categorical nature of the perception. The current study found that both Japanese and English speakers tended to associate voiced sounds with largeness, badness, and clumsiness and voiceless sounds with smallness, goodness, and gracefulness. However, for the shape dimension, English speakers only tended to associate voiced stop consonants with roundness and voiceless stops with spikiness. The present results show systematic sound symbolic relationships in terms of voicing for Japanese and English.
Identifying Co-reference of Zibun and Caki: The Case of Reflexives in Japanese and Korean
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Li, Noriyasu; Juffs, Alan
This study examines the properties of co-reference in DPs and the Japanese reflexive zibun, and the Korean reflexive caki. We posit that the resolution of local and long distance binding ambiguity in Japanese and Korean is influenced by the case particles that mark the reflexives. Results from a truth-value judgment task showed that Japanese and Koreans not only have different binding patterns but local and long distance binding varies based on case-marked reflexives. Bonferroni post-hoc tests revealed that Japanese prefer local binding when zibun is marked by the nominative case and long distance binding for the dative and accusative cases, while the Koreans prefer long distance binding when caki is marked by the genitive, dative, and accusative cases. Overall, our results show that further studies of reflexives should closely examine the role of case markers in ambiguity resolution and also examine how native speakers parse and process ambiguous sentences.
Context Dependency of Bare Gradable Adjective Predicates in Mandarin Chinese
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Wang, Qian
This paper provides an empirical description of the context dependency of bare gradable adjective predicates' interpretation in simple gradable adjective predications, polar questions, the contrastive focus construction, and gen…xiangbi comparisons in Mandarin Chinese. It presents empirical data and tests to argue that a bare gradable adjective predicate such as gao in the above four structures can either mean 'tall' (a positive reading) or 'taller' (a comparative reading) in appropriate contexts. The presented data set challenges the widespread assumption in prior literature that a bare gradable adjective predicate in the above four structures can only have the positive reading in all contexts.
Predictions of Entropy Reduction Theory on Chinese Relative Clauses
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Zhang, Borui
Processing difficulty in Chinese has been a challenge for theories of sentence parsing due to its lacking morphology and structural ambiguity. I use entropy reduction (ER) theory, based on a minimalist analysis of relative clauses (RCs), and tree-banks-based probabilistic grammar to make predictions on Chinese RCs (with various amounts of temporary ambiguity). The predictions match the results from the previous human experiments on Chinese. This provides supporting evidence to the reliability of ER theory and highlight the ability of the theory to deal with ambiguous sentences with the right grammar and analysis.
A Contrast of L1 Pronominal Usage: Japanese and Mandarin in Oral Narratives
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2018-10) Zhang, Ying
This study aims to analyze the use of subject (pro)nouns in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese through an experiment conducted on native speakers of the two languages. In storytelling, a significant contrast was observed between native Japanese and Chinese speakers' choices among third-person overt pronouns, referential nouns, and null pronouns. Results implied a fair amount of null pronouns were used in both languages, however, the Chinese use of overt pronouns differed from the Japanese use. After the first introduction of the referent, overt pronouns were used in Japanese narratives 5% of the time while 48% of the time by the Chinese participants (cf. 92% for L1 English narratives in Nakayama et al. 2015). In general, the difference in their frequency of usage between Chinese ta 'he/she/it' and Japanese kanojo/kare 'she/he', may be due to their respective historical development and the availability of their alternate meanings (i.e., 'girl/boyfriend' for kanojo/kare).

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