Toward empirical study of the “ontological” character of modern Japanese
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The so called “individualizing” linguistic typology – classified as “cognitive typology” by Pardeshi & Horie 2009 – has been characterizing the Japanese language as a BECOME-type of language, in contrast to a DO-type of languages (such as English). Although the idea has been present within the Japanese linguistics since at least Teramura (1976), it was mainly due to Yoshihiko Ikegami’s seminal work (1981) that the “ontological” character of Japanese gained attention throughout the various linguistic or philological frameworks (see e.g. Haga 2004 for kokugogaku, Kanaya 2003 for nihongogaku and others). Despite its popularity, the typological classification of Japanese as a BECOME-language is far from being uncontroversial, as it has been criticized (although on different grounds) by Takebayashi (2008), Noda (2015) and others. The present paper sees the sources of the aforementioned controversy in the lack of unified, systematic and empirically verifiable criteria for classifying a language as displaying either “ontological” (BECOME) or “processual” (DO) orientation. It presents perspective of a functional “text-based” typology with the use of Czech and Japanese corpus data, suggesting that the “cognitive type” of a language is to be identified in a concrete text, rather than in a speaker’s general linguistic knowledge. |