The verbals and insubordination in Altaic-type languages

要旨

This paper aims to show that intra-clausal syntax is crucially related to inter-clausal syntax and the development of insubordination.It also examines Evans's (2007) claim that the insubordination phenomenon often pertains to evidential and modal meaning.The term "Altaic-type language" (Kamei, Koono, and Chino 1996: 499) refers to a typologically coherent group of languages rather than to a genetically related group of languages.In this study, I use this term for the group of languages where the modifier always precedes the head, and most importantly, the predicate comes sentence-final.The languages examined in this study can be classified into two or three groups: on one hand, Korean and Nivkh have "verbal encoding adjectives" (i.e., adjectives that behave like, or can be treated as a subclass of, verbs); on the other, Nanai, an Altaic language has "nominal encoding adjectives."Old Japanese is classified as the latter, but Contemporary Japanese constitutes yet another group, or a language that has particular adjectives for one class of lexemes and nominal adjectives for the other.

主題