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Paper short abstract

The paper examines comparative correlative constructions in Japanese and Korean from a typological perspective, comparing them with other Asian languages. It analyzes their morphosyntactic strategies, diachronic development, and possible effects of language contact.

Paper long abstract

Keywords: comparative correlative; Asian languages; language contact; morphosyntax; linguistic typology

This paper focuses on the strategies employed by Japanese and Korean in the so-called comparative correlative constructions and their diachronic development. This analysis is informed by preceding typological research. Comparative correlative constructions express situations where a change in degree in one phenomenon leads to a change in another. In English these are expressed using the ‘the…the’ construction, as in ‘the more the merrier’, ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall’, etc. Different languages code these constructions in different ways, even though there are frequent similarities in the structure on the syntactic level (den Dikken, 2005).

East (and Central) Asian languages exhibit a wide variety of strategies of marking such constructions which will be briefly discussed and compared in this paper. These do often differ from patterns seen in most Indo-European languages, where the first clause starts with a relative pronoun, and the second with a demonstrative pronoun as in the Czech ‘Čím víc gólů dáme, tím víc bodů máme.’ This variability makes them interesting also from the typological point of view. Some Asian languages use rather straightforward strategies using double particles of degree, such as Manchu/Sibe, or Chinese, as in (1). Some outliers, such as Ewenki, employ comparative suffixes.

(1) Eli yawe-m(e) eli saxurum

PTC go-CVB PTC cold

‘It gets colder the further we go.’ (Sibe)

Others, such as Japanese, employ a rather more unusual construction where the verb/adjective first appears in a conditional converbal form, and then the same verb/adjective appears again in an adnominal form (in Japanese identical to the finite verb form) modifying a particle of degree (2). This can be followed by a different adjective or a whole clause. A surprisingly similar construction can be observed in Korean.

(2) Tabere-ba tabe-ru hodo oishii.

Eat-COND eat-NPST measure tasty

‘The more you eat the tastier it gets.’ (Japanese)

However, neither Japanese nor Korean appear to have used this type of construction consistently throughout their diachronic development. Extant data from different stages of these languages will be analyzed, and the possible influence of language contact will be discussed.