Journal of Universal Language
Sejong University Language Research Institue
Article

Desideratives and Person: Constructing a Semantic Map

Toshihiro Sugawara1
1University of Manitoba

Copyright ⓒ 2016, Sejong University Language Research Institue. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jan 01, 2017

Abstract

>This paper examines the implications of grammatical person for desiderative constructions from a cross-linguistic perspective. It is widely known that some grammatical systems in a language, such as pronoun systems, number distinction, and case marking systems, are sensitive to person differences. In this study, in addition to such grammatical systems, it was found that grammatical person also affects the form of desiderative constructions in several languages. In languages such as Japanese, Korean, Hua, and Cocopa, the form of desiderative construction with third person subject is somewhat differently constructed from that with first/second person subject. Also, in Samoan, the first and second person singular clitics are treated differently from the other person/ number clitics in desiderative constructions. In addition, it was found in Tagalog that the third person pronoun shows a different pattern regarding the use of enclitic sana from lexical nouns and other person pronouns. In order to capture the phenomena found in these languages, then, a semantic map model is adopted in this study, and a conceptual space is proposed for desideratives within which the distinctions found in this study are represented.

Keywords: desiderative; person; animacy hierarchy; semantic map; conceptual space

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