Full Description
This book provides a detailed survey of Korean and Japanese syntax from a comparative perspective, based within a generative framework. Yukata Sato and Sungdai Cho demonstrate that while the two languages exhibit remarkably similar morphosyntactic features, they behave differently in specific types of construction, with the main differences observed in genitive marking, sentence negation, Negative Polarity Items, the formation of causatives, and passivization. The book also explores pragmatic and sociolinguistic issues in the two languages, and shows that they differ in the perception and realization of 'givenness' as a topic marker and in the influence of relationships of power and distance on the use of honorifics. The authors further offer additional context by exploring the typological relationship between Japanese and Korean and the surrounding languages such as Ainu, and the Chinese and Altaic languages, as well as providing socio-cultural and historical background.
Contents
1: Introduction
2: Japanese and Korean
3: Writing systems
4: Case and postpositions
5: Topic and focus
6: Word order and scrambling
7: Passives and causatives
8: Relative clauses
9: Nominalization
10: Negation
11: Tense and aspect
12: Honorifics
References
Index
