| 31. |
- Toyota, Junichi
(author)
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On evolution of future tense
- 2010
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In: Anali Filološkog Fakulteta. - 0522-8468. ; , s. 219-240
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)
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| 32. |
- Toyota, Junichi, et al.
(author)
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On the evolutionary history of 'yes' and 'no'
- 2009
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In: Studies in language and cognition. - 9781443801744 ; , s. 485-498
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Small words like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ play an important part in our daily communication, but do we clearly know where they come from? Their origin is rather mysterious. We do not know if we need these words at all, since some languages manage without them. For instance, speakers of Celtic languages answer affirmatively and negatively by repeating verbs. However, functional motivations to have ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are obvious, since they are economical, and even those languages without obvious ‘yes’ and ‘no’ terms tend to form some sort of informational verbal signs corresponding to them. Our hypothesis is that in an initial stage ‘no’ is derived from a negation marker, and then becomes an independent word. Since the negative answer can be given with ‘no’, its affirmative counterpart is required. A number of features in linguistic structures are organized in binary pairs, and this is one such case. By revealing the history of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, one can detect one aspect of cognitive evolution in human communication, in a sense that the ever-growing demands for effective communication forced speakers to invent a new tactic based on a binary opposition to allow smoother communication.
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| 33. |
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| 34. |
- Toyota, Junichi
(author)
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Orientation reflected on register: from historical perspectives
- 2008
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Languages can be classified into three types, e.g. situation-oriented (e.g. Russian, Chienese, etc.), speaker-oriented (e.g. Bulgarian, Turkish, etc.) and hearer-oriented (e.g. English, Danish, etc.) (Durst-Anderssen 2005, 2006, 2008). In this paper, it is argued that the difference in spoken and written discourse can be compared to different patterns in these classificatory types, and historical changes in register can be explained through changes in these types. A particular example analysed here is inversion in English. Inversion involving negative adverbials such as Never have I seen such a scene is still possible in PDE, and it is more frequent in the written discourse than the spoken one. However, although this structure is still possible, it is becoming rather obsolete in the spoken discourse and the canonical order I have never seen such a scene is increasingly becoming more standardised. This is so, since inversion and freer word are common in speaker-orientation, but not in hearer-orientation. English has seen a change into hearer-orientation and inversion is not really suitable in this orientation type. Due to gradualness of changes, one can find overlap in features, but orientation types presented here can be a useful indicator of register, especially from historical perspectives.
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| 35. |
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| 36. |
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| 37. |
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| 38. |
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| 39. |
- Toyota, Junichi
(author)
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Re-evaluating comparative analysis between English and German: from Indo-European perspectives
- 2008
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- There has been much work concerning the comparative analysis on English and German (e.g. Hawkins 1986), but there is an area still less studied. Diachronic comparative studies in these languages show a typologically unique diversity within a same language family. What is used as a key factor in this paper is alignment change. Alignment can involve various linguistic features, but what various pieces of evidence (gender, tense-aspect, the passive voice, realisation of transitivity, etc., Toyota 2007) from these two languages indicate is that German is much more archaic than English. This can be further supported by orientation types of languages, which is closely related to alignment. What is commonly assumed as active alignment can be divided into speaker-oriented and hearer-oriented languages (cf. Durst-Anderssen 2005, 2006, 2008). German has the speaker-orientation and English, the hearer-orientation. So there is a slight difference even in alignment between these two languages. Some features such as word order is stable geographically, while alignment is persistent genetically (Nichols 1992), and the case of English and German (or the Germanic languages in general) goes against this typological generalisation. A much closer analysis of these languages can bring in new angles in future linguistic analysis.
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| 40. |
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