Buckeye East Asian Linguistics 8 (BEAL 8)

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https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/104702

We are pleased to deliver the eighth volume of Buckeye East Asian Linguistics. This volume is dedicated to Professor Charles J. Quinn Jr., who passed away on July 11, 2023. He taught classical and modern Japanese language, linguistics, and language pedagogy at The Ohio State University's Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL) from 1986-2023, with his first several years as the coordinator of the intensive Japanese language program under the Ohio Board of Regents' Challenge Grant. He finished his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan while he was teaching in DEALL and became an assistant professor from the subsequent term. Professor Quinn received the 1990 OSU Alumni University Distinguished Teaching Award and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1993. He was also a visiting professor at the Research Institute for Japanese Culture, Tohoku University, Japan, in 1993-94 and at the National Institute of Multimedia Education, Japan, in 1999-2000. During his 37 years at OSU, he supervised 1 Honors thesis, 11 M.A. theses, and 7 Ph.D. dissertations, in addition to serving on a number of other M.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertations in DEALL and as an external committee member at Indiana University and Columbia University. He directed the Japanese language programs at both Indiana University, from 1984-86 and the summers of 1987 and 1988, and at Ohio State multiple times over the years.

Front Matter
pp. i-v
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Izenkei in Early Japanese Kakari-musubi Clefts: A Provisional Account
Charles J. Quinn, Jr. pp. 1-50
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A Functional Approach to -aku Nominalization in Old Japanese Discourse Account
John Bundschuh pp. 51-64
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Cantonese Dialect-Writing and Korean Goyuhanja: Chinese Characters and Innovative Orthographic Creations
Marjorie K.M. Chan and Seojin Yang pp. 65-83
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Deictic Shift and the Origins of Japanese Demonstratives
Alexander Francis-Ratte pp. 84-97
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Japanese Speaking Span Test
Yuki Hattori and Mineharu Nakayama pp. 98-107
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“Yoku Taberu Constructions” and “Yoku Taberu Effect”: Examination of Ga/O Alternation in Regular Transitive Verb Sentences
Yu Hirata pp. 106-120
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Enhancing Improvisation Ability in Communication: Scaffolding Narrative Skills in Conversations
Yawei Li pp. 121-134
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Reinvestigating the L2 Acquisition of the Resultative V-te iru with a Refined Truth-Value Judgment Task
Keitaro Mitsuhashi pp. 135-158
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Critical Analysis of Language Textbook Conversations: Practicing Welfare Linguistics in Performed Culture Approach
Shinsuke Tsuchiya pp. 159-171
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Creating a Corpus: Issues in the Digital Text Processing of Cantonese, Hakkanese, and Taigi
Paul Ueda, Ka Fai Law, and Marjorie K.M. Chan pp. 172-191
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Why Language History Has a Role to Play in Modern Language Teaching
J. Marshall Unger pp. 192-197
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The Meaning of Death of Electrical Devices in English
Saori Wakita pp. 198-208
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The Pioneering Edo Analysis of Japanese Verb Conjugations
Paul Warnick pp. 209-222
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Front Matter (Volume 8, 2024)
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Buckeye East Asian Linguistics
Izenkei in Early Japanese Kakari-musubi Clefts: A Provisional Account
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Quinn, Charles J., Jr.
Kakari-musubi (“KM”) is an early Japanese focus construction that highlighted one constituent of a state or event (one term of an open proposition) with one of five emphatic kakari particles, and then concluded the sentence with a specially inflected predicate representing that situation/ proposition. The focused part is the kakari ‘onset’; the final, specially inflected predicate, its musubi ‘closure.’ These features make KM a cleft-like “term focus” (Heine and Reh 1984) construction. While researchers have developed characterizations of KM’s variants based on the semantics and pragmatics of the different kakari particles, similar examination of the musubi’s two differently inflected clause forms—adnominal rentaikei or non-finite izenkei ‘realized form,’ depending on the emphatic particle—has not kept pace (Frellesvig 2010). Semantic and pragmatic similarities between the two musubi forms have been identified (e.g., Quinn 1987), and they have been related derivationally (e.g., Ohno 1955; Martin 1987; Unger 1993; Hayata 1998; Shinzato and Serafim 2013; Whitman 2016). There is some consensus as to why the construction’s agreement rule for four of the five emphatic particles stipulates an adnominal/rentaikei-inflected predicate. However, why the fifth and most emphatic particle, koso, required the izenkei’s non-finite inflection has eluded a convincing explanation. This paper attempts to reconstruct one, by identifying or re-examining evidence that is often indirect, and bolstering it—judiciously, it is hoped—with relevant precedents and principles cited from today’s Japanese and other languages. A variety of evidence indicates that the rentai and the izen inflected clauses were nominals that indicated the speaker’s presupposition of the situation they referred to. From Japan’s earliest documents, rentai-inflected, ad-hoc clause nominals represented a range of individuated discourse entities, from agents, undergoers and experiencers, to events, times, and places, with a deictic ‘the X that [predicate]’ referentiality. It was in this role, we suggest, that rentai-inflected clause nominals were recruited for use as the presupposed part, the musubi, of the dominant type of KM: as a postposed, utterance-final topic, in a syntactic move well attested in early Japanese. This produced statements of the following sort: ‘It’s X—the one that [predicate].’ Thus positioned, in KM the rentai functioned initially as the ad-hoc, entity-referring nominal that it was in other contexts. By contrast, izen-inflected clauses outside KM are nowhere attested as ‘the one that [predicate]’ nominals, and therefore could not have been recruited in that role. All (non-KM) uses of the izen form in OJ served a different but nevertheless topic-like role: they circumstantially grounded other situations, sometimes concessively (‘although’) but most frequently as the presupposed protasis in a ‘given/when(ever) X, Y’ clause-linking construction. So we suggest that the izen-inflected form was recruited in its capacity as a conditional protasis (‘given/provided [predicate] being the case, …’) that stipulated the circumstances in which a second situation (its apodosis) was found. The consequent (apodosis) situation introduced with this provisional (Martin 1975, 1987) type of conditional was commonly non-volitional, “found,” and thus presented, inevitable. Postposed to a designative predication like X ko so ‘X, it’s this!,’ a provisional izenkei would have yielded a biclausal ‘X, it’s this—given P/as far as P is concerned.’ thereby indicating that ko so’s identification of X was categorical for P. Thus, the construction’s category-exhaustive focus was originally guaranteed by a postposed izen-inflected provisional and an emphatically designative apodosis. As it grammaticalized, and the language’s productive provisional became PIZ-ba, PIZ came to be regarded as just another musubi type, referring to the situation presupposed in the process of identifying X with koso. That, in turn, reciprocally, became the construction’s primary indicator of category-exhaustive, epitomizing meaning. On the way to the monoclausal/X koso PIZ/ KM construction, ko so ‘it’s this’ also underwent decategorialization and subjectification. This suggests that the received origin theory for this KM type is anachronistic.
A Functional Approach to -aku Nominalization in Old Japanese Discourse
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Bundschuh, John
The suffix -aku was a productive predicate nominalizer in Old Japanese but has lost productivity by Early Middle Japanese and is now limited to a generally unparsed segment of fewer than fifteen lexemes found in dictionaries today. While some studies have included investigations of the structure and semantics of the morpheme -aku at the lexical or sentential level, particularly in poetry, this study takes the discourse context into consideration in its investigation of the functions of -aku nominalization. In examining the functions of -aku nominalization throughout all genres of extant Old Japanese texts, it finds that these nominalizations were strongly tied to epistemic modality and most often used by speakers to create discourse referents for evaluation, particularly in highly emotive contexts.
Cantonese Dialect-Writing and Korean Goyuhanja: Chinese Characters and Innovative Orthographic Creations
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Chan, Marjorie K.M.; Yang, Seojin
The Chinese writing system, spanning over three millennia, has enjoyed the longest, uninterrupted literary tradition in world history. At the same time, it had also impacted neighboring countries such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. However, the script is not static; time moves on. Some complex characters were later replaced by simpler forms or by forms that add phonetic cues. Some characters became obsolete and new ones were created, reflecting the standard, or national, language, and are entered into authoritative dictionaries for nation-wide distribution and consultation. Orthographic forms that are of regional origin may occasionally be included in such dictionaries but are explicitly marked as dialectal forms. This study analyzes the Sinitic graphs that were created by Cantonese and Korean speakers, focusing on the methods of creating the vernacular graphs in Cantonese and the Goyuhanja (固有漢字) graphs in Korean. Other related issues are also addressed.
Deictic Shift and the Origins of Japanese Demonstratives
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Francis-Ratte, Alexander
In their highly original analysis, Frellesvig and Whitman (2008) propose a theory of deictic shift in Japanese, arguing that an earlier proximal demonstrative *i was replaced by *kɨ, which triggered a shift of *sɨ from distal to mesial reference. In so doing, they reconstruct a Proto-Japanese demonstrative set that closely resembles Korean. This paper shows that Frellesvig and Whitman’s reconstruction is contradicted by both data from Ryukyuan and by Quinn’s (1997) theory of kakari-musubi origins. Instead, I reconstruct an alternate system of Proto-Japanese demonstratives that rejects deictic shift in Japanese but nevertheless preserves convincing aspects of Frellesvig and Whitman’s theory. Finally, I show how it is possible to still find convincing correspondences between this Japanese demonstrative system and that of Korean. By identifying Japanese demonstratives so and ka as cognates with non-demonstrative grammatical markers in Korean, this paper suggests that some features of the Japanese phenomenon known as kakari-musubi may be Japano-Koreanic in origin, with some exploration of the implications that this has for the chronology of grammaticalizations in Japanese.
A Speaking Span Test for L2 Japanese Learners
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Hattori, Yuki; Nakayama, Mineharu
The newly created L2 Japanese Speaking Span Test (L2JSST) was reported in Hattori (2023a). However, its validity was difficult to confirm due to the small sample size and the underdeveloped nature of the field. This paper reports more relevant results on the L2JSST from 30 English-speaking learners of intermediate and advanced Japanese. Our statistical analysis shows that the L2JSST scores are significantly and positively correlated with the Japanese proficiency levels. Given this finding, we believe that the current version of L2JSST can be used to measure English-speaking learners’ working memory capacity in speech production in the same way that the English Speaking Span Tests measure (Daneman and Green 1986, Fortkamp 1999, etc.).
“Yoku Taberu Constructions” and “Yoku Taberu Effect”: Examination of Ga/O Alternation in Regular Transitive Verb Sentences
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Hirata, Yu
The ga/o alternation is a well-known phenomenon in Japanese linguistics, traditionally associated with stative predicates such as potential, desiderative, hosii ‘want,’ suki ‘fond,’ and wakaru ‘understand.’ This paper goes beyond the established understanding by demonstrating the feasibility of the ga/o alternation in regular transitive verb constructions, which we term "yoku taberu constructions." We coin the term "yoku taberu effect" to describe the process enabling this alternation. It is claimed that the yoku taberu effect can be attained by enhancing the stativity of the sentence, such as imbuing a habitual nature. This enhancement is facilitated through adverbial phrases or additional elements, such as those pertaining to frequency, quantity, or comparison. Moreover, we demonstrate that there are cases where the alternation with ga (the exhaustive listing ga) is possible even for particles other than the accusative o when the yoku taberu effect is attained.
Enhancing Improvisation Ability in Communication: Scaffolding Narrative Skills in Conversations
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Li, Yawei
This research explores pedagogy to build Chinese learners’ communicative competence that supports narrative improvisation during an ongoing conversation. The case study employs language learners’ improvised narratives on “breaking rules in class” in oral interviews to examine students’ different narrative structures in communication. Meticulously designing contextualized performances in class is key to facilitate the developed memory of language learners’ past experiences. These personal memories will accumulate and become a ready source for students to draw from for engaging narrative in everyday conversations. The ability to improvise a conversation effectively goes deeper than the one-time action and reflects a longer scaffolding process. By associating students’ prior experiences as subject matter for improvising responses in a conversation, language learning is more effective than simply reciting a script from memory.
Reinvestigating the L2 Acquisition of the Resultative V-te iru with a Refined Truth-Value Judgment Task
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Mitsuhashi, Keitaro
This study investigates the acquisition of the resultative V-te iru construction by L2 learners of Japanese. Previous studies have suggested that the resultative use of the V-te iru construction is more difficult to acquire than the progressive one among L2 learners. The results of the current experiment with a refined truth-value judgment task indicate that both intermediate and advanced learners have difficulty in the interpretation of the resultative V-te iru construction. This difficulty is caused not only by the acquisition of the V-te iru construction but also by the lexical acquisition of achievement verbs.
Critical Analysis of Language Textbook Conversations: Practicing Welfare Linguistics in Performed Culture Approach
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Tsuchiya, Shinsuke
In the realm of communications outside of classrooms, conversations that L2 users navigate do not always follow the route modeled in language textbooks. Under the frameworks of Welfare Linguistics and the Performed Culture Approach, this paper will illustrate the importance of intercultural competence in dealing with biased reactions in the Third Space (multilingual/cultural interactions) that can pose potential barriers for L2 users of Japanese from continuing their conversations in Japanese. These obstacles encompass the challenges of (1) being perceived as non-understandable, (2) responding to unwanted code-switching, (3) deflecting unsolicited compliments, and (4) dealing with third-person responses. As pedagogical implications, this paper will explore strategies to integrate these real-world situations into classroom activities. This approach aims to empower L2 users with critical thinking skills that will prepare them to navigate biased reactions effectively.
Creating a Corpus: Issues in the Digital Text Processing of Cantonese, Hakkanese, and Taigi
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Ueda, Paul; Law, Ka Fai; Chan, Marjorie K.M.
The encoding of texts written with Chinese characters posed a challenge to the early stages of digital technology. In the 21st century, the digital representation of Mandarin-based Standard Written Chinese faces few issues—typically limited to the realm of outdated or overly regional software. However, one major barrier that remains is the representation of varieties of Chinese that do not have a widely accepted or encoded orthography, which are the non-Mandarin varieties. The present text explores some of the challenges faced when creating a multilingual corpus of translations of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de St. Exupéry into Cantonese, Hakkanese, and Taigi. The results show that despite progress in Unicode representation, the technological gap between Standard Mandarin and other dialects remains large.
Why Language History Has a Role to Play in Modern Language Teaching
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Unger, J. Marshall
I briefly explain four examples of morphological irregularities involving gender and number that are synchronically inexplicable but can be understood as the product of diachronic changes. I then present a converse case in Japanese in which the apparently simplest explanation for certain verb forms fails to account for why most are conditionals while one is provisional. It may be expedient to tell language students that morphological irregularities are just “exceptions that prove the rule,” but why withhold the historical truth when it is helpful?
The Meaning of Death of Electrical Devices in English
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Wakita, Saori
The purpose of this study was to investigate the uses of die/dead in English and compare them with shinu in Japanese. In English and Japanese, the term die/dead is often used to describe a situation when an electronic device either runs out of battery or breaks. However, the interpretations of die/dead and shinu can be different depending on the context. For instance, keetai shinde(i)ru (‘a cellphone is dead’) can mean that it has a slow connection in Japanese, which is usually not expressed in English. To find out how die/dead is used to describe the situations of devices in English, the online corpus tool Sketch Engine was employed to obtain data from the web as well as X as a supplemental source. This data was analyzed on the intended meaning of die/dead. The results showed that the terms were used with three different meanings: out of charge, broken, and state of losing popularity in our data.
The Pioneering Edo Analysis of Japanese Verb Conjugations
(Ohio State University. Libraries, 2024-08) Warnick, J Paul
Fujitani Nariakira was an eminent scholar of the Edo period, recognized as the first to systematically analyze the Japanese language, including the conjugation system. He categorized word types and conducted groundbreaking analysis of the meaning and functions of particles (助詞, joshi) and auxiliary verbs (助動詞, jodooshi). This paper introduces his primary contributions and focuses on his analysis of verb conjugations. Nariakira’s classification system and terminology are described in relation to how the premodern conjugation system is understood and discussed today. His work is significant as the first examination of this essential part of language use and has influenced subsequent linguistic analyses. Nariakira incorporated a scientific, empirical approach to his analysis based on contextualized language use. His seminal influential work spans language, linguistics, and literature.

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Buckeye East Asian Linguistics 8 (BEAL 8)

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