Buckeye East Asian Linguistics 6 (BEAL 6)

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We are pleased to deliver the sixth volume of Buckeye East Asian Linguistics, though the publication project of this volume was delayed due to the COVID 19 pandemic. This volume is dedicated to Professor James H-Y. Tai, who taught Chinese linguistics at The Ohio State University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL) during 1986-1995, with his first year as a visiting professor. During his decade at OSU, he had advised two M.A. theses and twelve Ph.D. dissertations, in addition to serving on other theses and dissertations in DEALL and in Linguistics. Even after leaving OSU, Professor Tai had served as an adjunct faculty member on one M.A. thesis. His fondness for DEALL can also be seen in his establishment of an endowment, a James H-Y. Tai Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Fund, at the Department in 2018, as well as in making the initial donation in 2020 for the establishment of the Cantonese Gamluhk Fund to support DEALL’s offering of conversational Cantonese. The present volume for Professor Tai includes seven articles from current DEALL graduate students and past and present DEALL faculty members.

Contents

Front Matter
pp. i-v
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The Zero Initial in Chinese: A Preliminary Exploration into D2 and L2 Acquisition
Chan, Marjorie K. M. pp. 1-14
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Reanalyzing Variation in Written Taiwanese Southern Min: Proposing a Three Camp Framework
Cockrum, Paul pp. 15-32
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Old Chinese Loanwords in Indigenous Korean among Swadesh's 200 Words
Eom, Ik-sang pp. 33-48
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L2 Japanese Speaking Span Test: A Preliminary Report
Hattori, Yuki pp. 49-68
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Reflecting a Speaker's Feeling of Exasperation: The Case of the Cantonese Sentence-Final Particle lo1
Law, Ka Fai pp. 69-78
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Revisiting Old Japanese Auxiliary ki
Quinn Jr., Charles pp. 79-97
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Processing Katakana and Kanji Nouns in Japanese
Wakita, Saori pp. 98-120
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    Front Matter (Volume 6, 2023)
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2023-01)
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    The Zero Initial in Chinese: A Preliminary Exploration into D2 and L2 Acquisition
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2023-01) Chan, Marjorie K.M.
    The Chinese syllable traditionally consists of an initial and a final. If no overt consonant occupies the syllable-initial position, a zero initial (Ø) is placed there. This slot is often not empty, however, but contains a multitude of phonetic variants depending on such factors as (sub)dialectal differences and the phonetic properties of the following vowel. This small, preliminary study, making use of simple, visual inspection of waveforms and spectrograms in Praat, contributes to issues of facilitation and interference in D2 and L2 acquisition. The focus is on the zero initial before high vowels in the following three settings: within the Yue dialects (Zhongshan, standard Cantonese), across varieties of Chinese (Mandarin, Yue), and across languages (Chinese, English).
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    Reanalyzing Variation in Written Taiwanese Southern Min: Proposing a Three Camp Framework
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2023-01) Cockrum, Paul
    Standard Written Mandarin serves as the official standardized method of communication for much of China and Taiwan. Taiwanese Southern Min, conversely, has been characterized by some scholars as “chaos” due to the lack of a single unified system and heritage (Klöter 2005:249). However, the author proposes the Three Camp Framework to describe systematic variation in written Taiwanese through the analysis of multiple published sources. The Etymologist Camp is focused on the historical lineage and the reconstruction of original characters. The Modernist Camp incorporates the pluralistic influences on Taiwanese in its promoted standards. Finally, the Localist Camp promotes the usage of characters that have a local history or tradition in Taiwan. Within these groupings, samples of Written Taiwanese bear strong resemblance, differing mostly between the camps. The Three Camps Framework calls into question some preconceptions about “unstandardized” written language, thus being an important consideration for future work in the field.
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    Old Chinese Loanwords in Indigenous Korean among Swadesh’s 200 Words
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2023-01) Eom, Ik-sang
    The Korean lexicon largely consists of indigenous Korean and Sino-Korean words. What is notable is that a small number of what appears to be indigenous Korean words nonetheless sound similar to corresponding words in Old Chinese. It has been controversial as to how to interpret these similar words. Some historical linguists, such as Pan (2006, 2013) and O (2015), regard them as cognates while others as Old Chinese loanwords. Eom (Yan 2019) conducted an extensive examination of both views and concludes that those similar words are not cognates but are loanwords. Based upon nine similar words each between indigenous Korean and Old Chinese among Swadesh’s first and second tiers of 100-word lists, he claims that Korean has no genetic affinity with Chinese. Since the number of similar words in each tier is crucial to determine the linguistic relationship between the two languages in question, this article reexamines the validity of those 18 similar words and points out some problems that have to be further resolved. It is proposed here that the genetic relationship between Korean and Chinese remains the same even if the balance in the first and the second tiers of 100-word lists is slightly modified.
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    L2 Japanese Speaking Span Test: A Preliminary Report
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2023-01) Hattori, Yuki
    This paper presents a newly created L2 Japanese Speaking Span Test (L2JSST) and reports preliminary results on its validity based on ten English speaking learners of Japanese. The Intermediate High ~ Advanced Japanese learners took two Japanese language proficiency tests and L1 English Speaking Span test. All scores correlated with the scores of the L2JSST. Given this finding, we believe that the current version of JSST can be used to measure English speaking learners’ working memory capacity in speech production in the same way that the L2 Japanese Reading Span Test (Itomitsu and Nakayama 2005a) does in reading.
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    Reflecting a Speaker’s Feeling of Exasperation: The Case of the Cantonese Sentence-Final Particle lo1
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2023-01) Law, Ka Fai
    This paper analyzes the frequency distribution of the Cantonese sentence-final particle lo1 in a set of YouTube videos. Studies of the sentence-final particle lo1 in terms of its semantic and pragmatic functions have been well documented. Although some scholars have noted that lo1 is commonly used by the younger generation and is associated with the impatient attitude of a speaker, no further investigation with respect to such an association has been conducted. The data from this study of the YouTube videos suggests that high frequency occurrence of lo1 is linked to the speaker’s feelings of irritation and exasperation.
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    Revisiting Old Japanese Auxiliary ki
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2023-01) Quinn, Charles J. Jr.
    There is broad scholarly agreement that Old Japanese (OJ) auxiliary ki, operating over a non-finite form of another verb, e.g. omopi-ki (‘thinking’-ki) ‘(I) thought (it)’, indicated that the situation represented transpired prior to speech time. Ki is widely considered the basic past tense auxiliary of OJ and Early Middle Japanese (EMJ). But there are differences in opinion as to what kind of past ki expressed, especially in relation to other auxiliaries associated with past tense, such as kyeri. Martin (1987), for example, labels ki a perfect, but does not explain. This paper reviews OJ ki in its grammatical and discourse-pragmatic contexts, with an eye to features compatible and/or strongly associated with perfects cross-linguistically. It identifies several factors that, when present, prompt a perfect interpretation for conclusive ki, while contexts lacking such features indicate a past meaning. We suggest that after past ki emerged from an earlier perfect, both remained viable.
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    Processing Katakana and Kanji Nouns in Japanese
    (Ohio State University. Libraries, 2023-01) Wakita, Saori
    This study investigates how katakana and kanji nouns embedded in a Japanese sentence are processed among native speakers of Japanese by employing self-paced reading tasks. Darnell et al. (1994) found in their experiments that the orthographic type used for nouns did not affect reading times (RTs) when a noun appeared without its lexical associates in a sentence. This study extends their study to include another script, katakana, which was not tested in their study. Contrary to their findings, our experimental results revealed that RTs were faster when the target nouns were written in the more familiar script such as katakana dominant words in katakana. Moreover, it was observed that script types did not change the RTs significantly with or without lexical associates. However, there still remains the possibility that Japanese native speakers process nouns transcribed in kanji and katakana differently, and further investigation is necessary directly comparing katakana and hiragana before we conclude that nouns in a sentence are always read faster when they are written in familiar script forms.