East Asian Linguistics Workshop: "Where Grammar Meets Pragmatics: Relational Noun Modifying Clause Constructions in Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Armenian" by Kaoru Horie

Abstract:

This study aims to investigate a noun-modifying clausal construction which hasn’t received much typological attention, i.e. a “relational” Noun Modifying Clause Construction (NMCC).

“Relative clauses (RCs)” have been a topic of intense scrutiny in linguistic typology since the 1970s, originally inspired by the seminal work (Keenan and Comrie 1977) on the NP accessibility hierarchy. More recently, however, the notion of “General Noun Modifying Clause Constructions (GNMCCs)” was introduced into the field (e.g. Matsumoto 1997, Matsumoto, Comrie, and Sells 2017). A GNMCC is a single noun-modifying construction covering a wide range of interpretations including, but not limited to a “relative clause” interpretation. GNMCCs are known to be prevalent in the languages of East and Southeast Asia but are also attested in other regions including Europe. The notion of GNMCCs enabled typologists to identify varying types of NMCCs wherein the interpretive relationship between its head noun and the modifying clause is more “oblique” than those traditionally identified as RCs.

Of particular interest are the subtype of NMCCs referred to as “Relational NMCCs” by Matsumoto (1997) in Japanese. Relational NMCCs, which are abundant in Japanese, are characterized by the co-occurring head noun signaling a relational concept of varying semantic subtypes, e.g. “causal relation”, “temporal relation”, and “spatial relation”.

The current study thus compares four languages that have been identified to possess relational NMCCs, i.e. Japanese (isolate), Korean (isolate), Mandarin Chinese (Tibeto-Burman, Sinitic), and Armenian (Indo-European), to explore the range and the nature of possible crosslinguistic variation.

This preliminary study argues that relational NMCCs, particularly of “spatial” and “temporal” subtypes, serve to highlight the differing manifestations of grammar-pragmatics interface between languages. In languages like Japanese, a wide range of spatial and temporal NMCCs are possible arguably owing to the extensive role of pragmatic inference helping to interpret semantically underspecified MCs. The role of pragmatic inference is more limited in other languages wherein semantically underspecified MCs receive cross-linguistically differential acceptability judgements. This preliminary study thus calls for further investigations into relational NMCCs, which promise to shed light on the typology of grammar-pragmatics interface.

Biography:

Kaoru Horie is a professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University, Japan. Professor Horie combines his interest in cross-linguistic variation in the world’s languages with cognitive-functional linguistic approaches to language structure and use. His research interest centers around: (i) the cross-linguistically variable manifestation of ‘squishy’ phenomena observed with a variety of complex clause constructions, e.g. complement clauses, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and (ii) grammaticalization and language contact phenomena, and (iii) cross-linguistically differing roles of pragmatic enrichment and inference that compensate code underspecification. The languages he has worked on include (North-) East, South-East, and South Asian, and European languages, with a specific focus on Japanese-Korean morpho-syntactic and semantic/pragmatic contrasts.