This study addresses the semantic and functional diversities of the construction literally meaning ‘do and see’ in three East Asian languages: Japanese, Korean, and Ainu. The literal sense is dominant in Ainu, the tentative sense is predominant in Japanese, and the experiential sense as well as the tentative sense is very common in Korean. The study advances a discourse-pragmatic analysis with respect to speech-event conceptions that underlie the different senses of the construction.
This article examines Japanese idiosyncratic dative case markings, which cannot be accounted for by the semantics of verbs per se. We argue that the underlying mechanism is best described in terms of “blending of prefabricated forms in language production” (Barlow 2000), demonstrating that the relevant prefabricated structures provide a scaffold for the development of the use of dative ni in question. This study further explores some comparable non-canonical case markings observed in Korean subordinate clauses, suggesting that they can also be similarly characterized.
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