Earticle

Conclusive auxiliary verbs which organize a noun sentence in modern Japanese are consisted of ‘da/de-aru/desu/de-arimasu/de-gozaimasu’, which are sentence final particles. Most of all, there are two auxiliary verbs that are comparable in usage. ‘da’ used to be a dialect derived from Kanto province since the Middle Ages, while ‘ja’ originated from Kansai province. After the standard language had been enacted, ‘da’ is now used as a standard form while ‘ja’ is considered to be a ‘博士語’ or ‘老人語’. I researched ‘da’ and ‘ja’ that can be seen in the works of various genre in the early Meiji era with the aim of clearly differentiating the two forms. In conversation, ‘da’ has been used regardless of speaker's class and gender since it has always been a spoken style. Although ‘ja’ had a feature of a colloquial style which was used in lecture notes and addresses.

The objective of this paper is to give strong support to the idea of overt movements in non-finite clause based on the linearization pattern of clitics. This paper will be rather descriptive, spiraling around the placement pattern, with a basic orientation towards surface-level order of words given the corpus of Medieval Spanish. In addition, the debate is going on with regard to the same hierarchical structure of Medieval Spanish shown in non-finite clause as is shown in finite clause. As suggested for Medieval Spanish examined in this paper, overt movement in non-finite clause is to be entirely accounted for in the hierarchical structure of sentence. Within the theoretical framework of Principles and Parameters, in particular, the placement effect of clitics to their infinitive are optionally subject to the parameters of variation, which the paper place among the functional features of the category Tense, and depends on the projection of a discourse-related category TopP superior to TP in non-finite clause of Medieval Spanish.

The causative alternation in English is semantically determined: change-of-state denoting unaccusatives but not activity-denoting unergatives can participate in the alternation. Surprisingly, manner-of-motion verbs, one subtype of unergatives, can appear in lexical causatives when accompanied by a directional complement. In contrast, the causatives in Korean don't seem to be semantically conditioned. Furthermore, Korean manner-of-motion verbs which are unequivocally activity-denoting unergative verbs fail to participate in the alternation and a goal complement can appear in the presence of a directed motion verb ka- in Korean. The main objective of the paper is to examine Korean speakers' knowledge of lexical causatives in English. Results of the study suggest that the learners generally know semantic properties pertinent to the causative alternation, showing their ability to extract abstract semantic determinants from the variable input. Nevertheless, the data reveal that the acquisition of lexical causatives with manner-of-motion verbs with a directional PP is delayed. Such delayed acquisition is accounted for by constructionists' views, the difference between the case of instantiation and of modification and by L1-transfer.

A protocol is a predefined written procedural method in the design and implementation of experiments in the natural science in order to standardize a laboratory method to ensure successful replication of results by others. Detailed protocols also facilitate the assessment of results through peer review. In this study, a type of team protocol method is adopted for enhancing and activating group discussion sessions of subject course taught in English at the college level. Students are required to compile and submit a very highly elaborated written protocol reports per session as a part of requirement and for evaluation. Advantages of the method are fully exploited to ensure quality of discussion to its maximum level. Exact components, procedures and employment schemes are fully described and explored. Finally, actual course evaluation is provided as a substantial and supporting evidence for the benefit of the method. The method has proven to be an effective way of dealing with well-known defects of conventional discussion activity.

The purpose of this study is to look into the historical changes in body part terms in English and German. The body part terms belong to a basic vocabulary which is well-known that it shows the highest level of lexical continuity through time. This study observes the change phenomena in the forms and meanings in each body part terms commonly found in the history of English and German, and analyzes the types and causes of such changes in comparison with other Germanic languages. The types and causes of the changes are described in two aspects, lexical change such as borrowing by language contact with other foreign languages and semantic change such as meaning exchange, meaning extension and reduction. The close inspection on the body part terms shows that the body part terms, as expected, are well preserved in two languages, although some borrowings are accepted. And generally, German preserves better the original germanic words than English. Sometimes, the differences of terms between English and German are made, when English and German chooses a different word among several synonyms. It is assumed that various cultural and social factor influenced on that.

Tonal development in Athabaskan languages from Proto-Athabaskan manifests in three different ways: (a) H tone marked languages, (b) L tone marked languages, and (c) non-tonal languages. This type of tonogenesis is argued to be due to the coordination problem (Bermúdez-Otero, 2007), in which misperception leads to the restructuring of grammar, which results in the creation of tone. The diachronic changes in Athabaskan languages provide further evidence for the relationship between tonogenesis and consonant-tone interaction because tone developed in opposite ways in different languages of Athabaskan. The seemingly contradictory tonal development patterns will be explained by a constraint based theory of consonant-tone interaction.