Adversity and Korean/Japanese Passives: Constructional Analogy

Oshima, David Y.

doi:10.1007/s10831-005-4915-6

Cited by 20 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Kuno, 1973;Oshima, 2006), which is not tested here. However, it is possible that Japanese speakers generalize from the adversity restriction in indirect passives to direct passives-essentially a syntactic neighborhood effect where patterns in one construction affect another construction (e.g., Jared, McRae & Seidenberg, 1990;Juliano & Tanenhaus, 1994;Pearlmutter & MacDonald, 1995).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Artificial language studies show that speakers learn event-structure mappings, with consequences for the particular construction used to describe that event (Perek & Goldberg, 2015;in press). Similarly, a natural language example might be seen in Korean, where events in which a patient is adversely affected are more associated with passive structure descriptions than events with non-adverse outcomes (Oshima, 2006;Park, 2005;Song & Choe, 2007).…”

Section: Multiple Forces Shaping Production Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, we investigate the effect of Clause, that is, the contrast between main clauses in Experiment 1 and relative clauses in Experiment 2, in order to better quantify the impression from the individual experiments that the passive rates are similar across the two clause types. Second, we investigate cross-language behavior by items, specifically whether the adversity of the depicted event tended to promote the production of passives in Korean, where this tendency is well-attested in these sentence types (Oshima, 2006), as well as in English or Japanese.…”

Section: Comparisons Of Main and Relative Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To this point, we have argued that the lower rate of passives in Korean likely stems from a restriction to passive use mainly for adverse events (Oshima, 2006), in contrast to Japanese and English, where this restriction is not present. Japanese does have an adverse passive, but the adverse meaning generally is associated with indirect passives, as when an intransitive verb is passivized, as in a sentence that could translate as Becky was showed up late by Karen, meaning that Becky was adversely affected by Karen's showing up late.…”

Section: Adversity In Passivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As noted, we expect that we will see effects of animacy in all languages and across both main and relative clauses. The second message factor is adversity, where Korean passives are thought to be generally reserved for adverse events, while Japanese and English do not have this restriction (though Japanese does have an adversity restriction on another kind of passive construction; see Oshima, 2006). Our picture materials were not originally designed to manipulate adversity, but subsequent norming shows that they do show a range of pleasant and adverse events, and so it is reasonable to expect passive rates to vary with adversity in Korean.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Montag

Matsuki

Kim

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

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Cross-linguistic studies allow for analyses that would be impossible in a single language. To better understand the factors that underlie sentence production, we investigated production choices in main and relative clause production tasks in three languages: English, Japanese and Korean. The effects of both non-linguistic attributes (such as conceptual animacy) and language specific properties (such as word order) were investigated. Japanese and Korean are structurally similar to each other but different from English, which allowed for an investigation of the production consequences of non-linguistic attributes in different typological or word order contexts (when Japanese and Korean speakers make similar production choices that are unlike those of English speakers), as well as production choices that differ despite typological similarity (when Japanese and Korean speakers make different choices). Speakers of all three languages produced more passive utterances when describing animate entities, but the overall rate of passives varied by task and language. Further, the sets of items that were most likely to elicit passives varied by language, with Japanese and Korean speakers more likely to produce passives when patients were adversely affected by the depicted event. These results suggest a number of factors that contribute to language production choices across three languages, and how general cognitive constraints on sentence production may interact with the structure of a specific language.Keywords: Sentence production; relative clauses; passives; cross-linguistic analysis; Japanese; Korean An English speaker in a coffee shop, desiring coffee, might say, "A coffee," or "I'll take coffee, a small one, please," or "May I have a small?" Even in this highly constrained context, many different utterances can convey the speaker's message. This flexibility of language production, and speakers' abilities to navigate the high number of lexical and syntactic options to converge on a single utterance form, are central features of the production process and have become important topics of research. The research presented here addresses these issues by comparing production across three different languages and two different sentence constructions. This approach provides a detailed picture of how production flexibility-the availability of alternative syntactic and lexical options to convey a message-can vary across language and message, and how these factors shape speakers' implicit choices of words and sentence structures, providing insight into how language production processes settle on an utterance plan over alternative possibilities. Multiple Forces Shaping Production ChoicesLanguage production researchers have long recognized that the properties of both words and sentence structures affect producers' implicit utterance choices. Recently, several researchers have aimed to characterize a range of these effects by contrasting two means by which speakers converge on a single string of to-be-articulated words. Sentence const...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Multiple Forces Shaping Production Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Comparisons Of Main and Relative Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Adversity In Passivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Montag

Matsuki

Kim

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

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Japanese rare-constructions and the nature of the passive

Seo

2023

J East Asian Linguist

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Affected Experiencers

Bosse

Bruening

Yamada

2012

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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Numerous languages permit an NP that is not selected by the verb to be added to a clause, with several different possible interpretations. We divide such nonselected arguments into possessor, benefactive, attitude holder, and affected experiencer categories, on the basis of syntactic and semantic differences between them. We propose a formal analysis of the affected experiencer construction. In our account, a syntactic head Aff(ect) introduces the experiencer argument, and adds a conventional implicature to the effect that any event of the type denoted by its syntactic sister is the source of the experiencer's psychological experience. Hence, our proposal involves two tiers of meaning: the at-issue meaning of the sentence, and some not-atissue meaning (an implicature). A syntactic head can introduce material on both tiers. Additionally, we allow two parameters of variation: (i) the height of the attachment of Aff, and (ii) how much of the semantics is at-issue and how much is an implicature. We show that these two parameters account for the attested variation across our sample of languages, as well as the significant commonalities among them. Our analysis also accounts for significant differences between affected experiencers and the other types of non-selected arguments, and we also note a generalization to the effect that purely not-at-issue non-selected arguments can only be weak or clitic pronouns.

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Adversity and Korean/Japanese Passives: Constructional Analogy

Cited by 20 publications

References 9 publications

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Japanese rare-constructions and the nature of the passive

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