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Sökning: WFRF:(Toyota Junichi) > (2009)

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1.
  • Toyota, Junichi, et al. (författare)
  • Emergence of future tense based on socio-cognitive factors
  • 2009
  • Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
    • It can be claimed that the emergence of the future tense is closely related to cognitive and cultural artefacts from our earlier civilisations, such as burial practices and concepts of afterlife. In this paper, we present one such specific case concerning the concept of zero. The zero and nothingness have haunted earlier thinkers, philosophers and theologians alike, since the idea of ex nihil ‘out of nothing’ interfered with basic religious doctrine. In a number of civilisations, astronomy developed independently, and trained people could forecast seasonal changes such as dry and rainy periods, by having observed changes in the moon, or even the sun, for many years. This ability to forecast is a significant step in the development of human cognition, but it was not powerful enough to force a specific form referring to the future in grammar to appear. What seems to be a clue, among a few others, is the numerical value of zero as null. Many civilisations had a complex counting system, but they often lacked the concept of zero, except in Babylonia and the Ancient Maya culture. In Babylonia, the zero was used as a place holder in the documentation of counting, and there was no numerical value attached to it, but in Maya, the zero had a full-fledged numerical value. In Old Mayan languages, even in reconstructed Proto-Maya, it is possible to assume the presence of a specific future tense. Grammatically speaking, this was quite an innovation at that time. Judging from these facts, it is possible to assume a close linkage between the concept of zero and the presence of future tense in a language. They may not appear to be connected, but an important link is the understanding of the irrealis world, i.e. the world that speakers cannot perceive directly. As presented in this paper, it is possible to explain certain linguistic changes based on non-linguistic factors, and the evolution of human cognition seems to play an important role in revealing the history of human language.
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  • Toyota, Junichi (författare)
  • Emotion and perception from typological perspectives
  • 2009
  • Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
    • Emotion and perception are expressed in every language, but their linguistic analysis is surprisingly sparse at typological level. In this paper, an initial attempt is made to describe typological characteristics of emotion and perception and form an initial classification. Verbal constructions expressing emotion and perception normally have a slightly different argument structure in comparison with other verbs. This is so, because emotion or perception happens spontaneously from a viewpoint of experiencer. Because of this, the middle voice is often used for this structure, and if not, the outer stimulus is realised as a grammatical subject and experiencer as an end point of stimulus. So structures like 'This likes to me' are common crosslinguistically. However, there are some variations, and once constructions are seen from historical perspectives, differences can be attributed to the change of alignment. In other words, emergence of accusative/ergative alignment, which assumes a higher degree of transitivity in grammar, altered structure. A historically older structure is sensitive to spontaneity, i.e. ‘This likes to me’ type, but newer ones form exceptions. So emotion and perception are closely connected to alignment change and development of transitivity.
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  • Toyota, Junichi (författare)
  • Globalisation, language contact and historical change: a case of Slavic languages and beyond
  • 2009
  • Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
    • In recent years, contact-induced language changes have been hotly discussed (e.g. Heine 2003; Heine and Kuteva 2005), and in this paper, a similar line of argument is presented concerning the Slavic languages, and a similar developmental path is applied to minority languages. Based on analogy, future state of minority languages is predicted. Some languages in the Indo-European family are known to have preserved archaic structures, e.g. Celtic, Baltic and Slavic. What is common among them is that the areas where these languages are spoken did not go through some cultural changes such as Renaissance or the age of enlightenment. These cultural movements allowed people in Europe to have more contact among people which forced the changes in the languages they speak. Similar changes can be found elsewhere in the world, such as in Japan, where the opening of the market in the 18th century accelerated changes in the language. Following this line of argument, what would be the fate of minority languages in the ever growing globalisation? It seems quite plausible to argue that some of these languages are bound to change due to the exposure to neighboring different languages an inevitable language contact. However, those isolated languages can maintain the current structure, as in the case of Celtic, Baltic and Slavic languages. Therefore, the language contact can have a significant impact on the future of minority languages.
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  • Toyota, Junichi (författare)
  • Minority languages and their value to linguistic studies: beyond sociolinguistics
  • 2009
  • Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
    • Language diversity and minority languages are closely connected and documentation of minority languages is particularly valuable in respect to historical studies, i.e. less-documented languages which are on the verge of extinction often present valuable pieces of information to indicate what languages in the past might have looked like (cf. uniformitarian principle). For instance, the development of earlier verbal inflection often consisted of gerund or verbal noun form used along with the copula verbs. The tense-aspectual inflection was made only on the copula, but rarely on the main verbs themselves. This grammatical state can be hinted from the development of words corresponding ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – a word for ‘yes’ is often derived from the copula verb. Judging from the fact that some languages in the world lack such words and they simply repeat the verb for reply, the copula was earlier used more frequently than in modern languages. This line of development is actually visible in, for instance, minority languages such as the Celtic languages. Without such languages, our argument remains highly speculative, but thanks to documentation and analysis of these languages, one can make a large step forward in different field of linguistic analysis. This suggests that one should re-appreciate the value of minority languages.
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10.
  • Toyota, Junichi, et al. (författare)
  • On the evolutionary history of 'yes' and 'no'
  • 2009
  • Ingår i: Studies in language and cognition. - 9781443801744 ; , s. 485-498
  • Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)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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