[Asia_news] Japan Centre Seminar [Michinori Shimoji, 13-10-06, E2.12, 12pm]

[Shunichi Ishihara]

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      Japan Centre Seminar
       - see:
http://asianstudies.anu.edu.au/wiki/index.php/Japan_Centre_Seminars

       Friday, 13th October, 2006, 12pm
       BPB E2.12, Faculty of Asian Studies, College of Asian and the
Pacific, ANU
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Title: Adjectives in Irabu Ryukyuan*
Speaker: Michinori Shimoji, PhD candidate, Department of Linguistics, RSPAS

In this talk I will give a descriptive summary of adjectives in Irabu
Ryukyuan, a dialect of Southern Ryukyuan language, as spoken on Irabu
Island, Okinawa, Japan. Irabu Ryukyuan and some other Southern Ryukyuan
dialects are typologically quite distinct from other Japonic languages
and dialects in the morpho-syntactic coding strategies for property
concepts (adjectival concepts). That is, while most Japonic languages
and dialects employ verbal strategies to encode property concepts, or
verbal strategies and nominal strategies are root-specific (as in
Standard Japanese utukusi-i ¡Æbeautiful (verbal strategy with -i)¡Ç and
kiree-da ¡Æbeautiful (nominal strategy with -da)¡Ç, but not *utukusi-da or
*kiree-i), Irabu Ryukyuan and some other Southern Ryukyuan dialects
employ both verbal and nominal strategies for the same adjective root,
which is typologically called ¡Æswitch-adjectival¡Ç system (Wetzer 1996).
Thus in Irabu we observe such examples as kagi-kam ¡Æbeautiful (verbal
strategy)¡Ç and kagi-munu ¡Æbeautiful (nominal strategy)¡Ç.

In this talk I will describe each morpho-syntactic strategy of
adjectival encoding in Irabu Ryukyuan, and some attempts will be made to
clarify the functional differences of each strategy identified. *Below
is a set of basic information of Irabu Ryukyuan:

Name of language: Irabu Ryukyuan
Genetic affiliation: Japonic>Ryukyuan>Southern Ryukyuan> Miyako dialect
group
Geography: Irabu Island, Okinawa prefecture, Japan
Number of speakers: 2,000~2,500 (cf. Island population 6,900)
Viability: seriously endangered (most of the speakers are over their 60¡Çs)
Grammar: not available (the current author is working on producing a
grammar)
Dictionary: editing in progress by Sadayoshi, Tomihama¡¡(a retired local
high school teacher)
Texts: short text material by Shibata (1972), Shimoji (2006a, 2006b)