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- Toyota, Junichi
(författare)
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Aspect as a sign of historical development
- 2008
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Ingår i: Studia Romanica Tartuensia. - 1406-9091. ; 6, s. 133-151
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper analyses a specific stage in the development of alignment system in Indo-European languages. It is argued that one of the most crucial stages is the appearance of binary features, which allows the language to develop into a form ready for dealing with complex functional demands.
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- Toyota, Junichi
(författare)
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Caucasian languages and language contact in terms of religions
- 2008
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- From a historical view point, one of the most striking features in the Caucasian languages is the preservation of archaic linguistic structures, often represented by the active alignment. These languages might have had contact with non-Caucasian languages but the contact-induced changes may not be as obvious as those in other languages in Europe. In this paper, it is argued that the preservation of older linguistic structure is somehow related to religion, or more precisely, religious reformation. The majority of IE languages have changed dramatically after the Renaissance period and Church reformation. The Orthodox and Sunni Muslims are two main religions in the Caucasus region, but they have not gone through a major reformation as in the Catholic and Protestant Churches. This can be a reason for the current status of the Caucasian languages.
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- Toyota, Junichi
(författare)
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Globalisation and language contact: impact on historical change and exceptions
- 2008
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Language contact through globalisation has indeed influenced various changes in a number of human languages in different corners of the world. In recent years, some scholars have focused particularly on language contact as a reason behind historical changes, and some even consider that the language contact is the major force. In this paper, however, it is argued that language contact can be negligible in some cases and changes can be triggered by other factors, such as human cognitive faculty. A particular case analysed in this paper is English and other Indo-European languages, starting from its ancestral language, Proto-Indo-European. Seeing from the time span of 6,000 years or more, it is possible to see that there is a cycle involving binary grammatical features. These features become complex at some stage, i.e. ternary or quaternary, and then become binary again. Binary opposition is beneficial to our cognition, since it is much easier to process information. Ternary or quaternary choices force us to use wider capacity and cognitive load to deal with informational input. As our society develops, information we need to communicate become more and more complex, and languages have developed in order to cope with this complexity. This is how languages develop ternary or quaternary system of grammatical structure. The complex structures, interestingly, often return to their original, simpler, binary structure. So, it is argued here that various changes observable in English and other Indo-European languages can be considered closely related to human cognitive ability, especially in relation to the retention of binary features. Binary features allow us to ease the load on our cognition and it has proven to be useful. This factor can be considered more significant than the language contact in historical changes and this can leave out influence from the language contact in diachronic changes.
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- Toyota, Junichi
(författare)
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History of Indo-European languages: alignment change as a clue
- 2008
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Grammatical structure of Indo-European (IE) languages may appear to be diverse, but it is in fact more systematic than one may think. What is significant in explanation is alignment, i.e. differences represent different stages in the alignment change from active one to accusative one. This means that the grammatical structure was earlier organised by aspectual differences between perfective and imperfective aspect, but it has changed into a transitivity-based structure. There are varying degrees of changes and some languages still carry much residues of earlier active alignment. For instance, sensitivity to aspectual distinction in Slavic languages is one of such residues. On the contrary, some languages have developed new structures, such as the passive voice in English. There are a number of constructions useful for identifying archaicness of languages, which include impersonal verbs, the middle voice/reflexive, grammatical gender (especially neuter), number (especially treatment of mass nouns), case marking, agreement, word order, etc. By comparing them, one can identify how much each language has developed, which allows us to explain the diversity in the Indo-European grammar more systematically. Alignment change has not been given its deserved attention, but this paper proves that it is significant in historical analysis.
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- Toyota, Junichi
(författare)
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History of ‘yes’ and ‘no’: evidence from Proto-Uralic and beyond
- 2008
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Little is known the evolution of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in human language, and in this paper, an attempt is made to make a first step in revealing how our ancestor came up with these words. Our analysis starts with Proto-Uralic, and then we compare its developmental path to other languages in the Indo-European family. It has been documented that in Proto-Uralic (ca. 4,000 BC) there existed e ‘no’, but not word for ‘yes’ (cf. Décsy 1977: 81-82). Our hypothesis proposed in this paper is that human languages initially managed without ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Answers were given by repeating a verb, e.g. Are you happy – I am (for ‘yes’) and I am not (for ‘no’). The ‘no’-word was created by dropping a verb (e.g. not from I am not), and it stood on its on at the initial stage and later became an independent word. Since the negative answer can be given with ‘no’, its affirmative counterpart is somehow required, given a rise of ‘yes’. This line of argument is related to the binary features commonly found in the grammar of proto-languages (what Toyota 2004 terms kaleidoscopic grammar). Binary features are often cognitively less demanding and they suited the basic frame of emergent grammatical structures. In this sense, the presence of ‘no’ on its own in Proto-Uralic is considered to have forced its opposition ‘yes’ to appear in the course of forming the modern Uralic languages. It is true that it is much easier to find a linkage between the negative marker and ‘no’, and the word for ‘yes’ is often difficult to trace historically. For instance, in Slavic languages, the common ‘yes’-‘no’ pair is da/tak ‘yes’ and nie/ni/ne ‘no’, except in Slovak, e.g. áno ‘yes’/nie ‘no’. The binary feature can be found beyond linguistic features. For instance, pre-historic artefacts, such as spearhead, axes, cave paintings, etc., are normally binary in shape or design. This suggests that emergence of complex patterning is reasonably late in human evolution. One possible exception is the Celt: earlier artefacts from their civilisation involve a complex ternary or quaternary patterning. Interestingly, Celtic languages do not have the ‘yes’-‘no’ words, and they still repeat verbs in reply. This specific case needs further analysis, but it seems to suggest that the longer period for binary features is required for the development of ‘yes’ and ‘no’. This clearly shows that there is relationship between binary features of human cognition and the development of ‘yes’ and ‘no’. So, the study of the origin of these words should deserve more attention.
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- Toyota, Junichi, et al.
(författare)
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Impact of religion on understanding the world: development of tense and modality
- 2008
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper analyses an impact of religious practice on the development of the tense system, in particular the future tense. There have been rich typological studies on the tense, which reveal that a basic tense distinction is either past vs. non-past or past vs. present vs. future in most languages. From evolutionary/historical perspectives, the former case is older than the latter one, i.e. the formation of the future tense is reasonably late in human language. What could have affected the development? We argue that the religious practice, including primitive practices such as shamanism, can be a good indicator of the development cross-linguistically. Our working hypothesis is that languages spoken in a culture where rich religious practices and mythology are found tend to develop the future tense earlier in the development. Some intermediate stages can be found in languages where the future tense is expressed with auxiliaries, and world languages are at varying stages in the development. What our initial study shows is a co-relation between a certain way of dealing with afterlife and the presence/absence of the future tense. In some cultures, people’s life is more or less destined even after death, in a sense that their life in the future or after death, is already set and people are believed to be on a constant, often cyclic, journey. So although the afterlife is not known to us, i.e. it belongs to the irrealis mood, speakers have a fairly good idea about what it looks like and they tend to treat it as something that belong to the realis world, not irrealis one. So this idea does not encourage the development of the future form. When the fate or destination of afterlife is kept ambiguous, such as not knowing whether one goes to heaven or hell, the future tense starts to emerge earlier in the development, and the tense system later grows into the future vs. present vs. past distinction. This is so, because speakers are dealing with concepts that belong to the irrealis mood. Our finding does not necessarily have to be a definition and one should expect some exceptions. However, based on our initial research, it seems promising that a strong connection can be found between religion/mythology and the tense system in human language, reflecting on speaker’s cognitive development in dealing with events in the irrealis modality.
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