Aims of the conference

The fundamental objective of the conference is to straighten out the state-of-the-art issues surrounding the compound and complex verbs in individual languages by locating them in a larger context of similar phenomena in other Asian languages. The development of a more precise distribution of such verb-verb complexes in Asian languages is expected to lead to a substantial contribution from Asia to the typological studies in the West, where the significance of such compound verbs is not adequately appreciated (for example, WALS does not contain information on them).

It is well known that Japanese is marvelously abundant in compound and complex verbs consisting of two verbs, as in nage-ireru lit. 'throw (tr.) + put into (tr.)' = 'throw (a thing) into (a place)' and tabe-te simau lit. 'eat-GERUNDIVE put.away' = 'finish eating / eat it all and leave nothing'. The two-day conference, held as an event in NINJAL's international symposium series, aims at probing the mysteries involved with the linguistic properties, origins, and development of such Japanese V-V complexes and the corresponding or nearly corresponding V-V sequences in languages of continental Asia from both language-internal and areal-typological perspectives.

These two perspectives are motivated by the fact that V-V complexes are considered a distinctive hallmark of most Asian languages, and not just of Japanese. Because of this, Indo-Aryan languages as well as Korean and other East Central and Southeast Asian languages will be brought to bear on the issues pertaining to Japanese, whereby a much deeper understanding of the phenomena is expected to emerge than when Japanese alone or Hindi alone, for example, is analyzed. Pertinent issues are outlined in the position paper. POSITION PAPER

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