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David Y Oshima

Syntactic direction and obviation as empathy-based phenomena: a typological approach

In previous studies, various syntactic/semantic factors (person hierarchy, animacy, topicality, etc.) have been discussed as relevant to linguistic phenomena known as syntactic direction and nominal obviation. This article develops and motivates a uniform analysis of the direct/inverse and obviation marking (DIO-marking), based on the (extended) theory of linguistic empathy. Drawing on data from four languages that belong to different families (Cree, Navajo, Jinghpaw, and Japanese), I discuss that the empathy-based approach (i) provides a uniform analysis of DIO-systems in different languages, as well as the yaru/kureru opposition in Japanese, which have been believed to be controlled by different sets of syntactic/semantic factors, and (ii) dispenses with construction-specific rules/constraints such as the person constraint, the possessive constraint, and the ban on multiple proximates within a clause. I also demonstrate that the empathy-based account allows us to model similarities/contrasts among DIO-systems in a comprehensive way, reducing crosslinguistic differences into two planes: (i) the plane of E-marking: how and to what extent empathy relations are encoded, and (ii) the plane of E-ranking: what factors affect (more) empathy relations.

Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0024-3949
Volume: 45, 07/2007
Pages: 727 - 763

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