Grammar of Proprioceptive-states Expressions in Thai and Japanese
(文法は感情・感覚的経験をどのように表現するか？-タイ語・日本語を中心に-)

Shoichi Iwasaki
Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

 

Proprioceptive-states refer to physical sensations (e.g. “feeling pain”) and emotional conditions (e.g. “being happy”) that human beings experience internally within themselves. These states are directly observable only by the person who is in that state, and contrast sharply with the external-states (e.g. “being tall”) which can be observed by any person. It is not surprising, then, that some languages make grammatical distinctions between these two qualitatively different states.

In this talk, I discuss the structure of proprioceptive states expressions in Thai and Japanese, and first show that these languages clearly make a distinction between the proprioceptive expressions on the one hand and the external-state description on the other. While Japanese uses the same predicate form to refer to an external-state regardless of whose state is being described (e.g. boku/taroo wa te ga nagai), it uses different form to refer to a proprioceptive state (e.g. boku wa ureshii vs taroo wa ureshigatteiru). Thai uses different constituent orders to distinguish the two types of state. An external state is described by the order of ‘body part’ followed by an adjective (e.g. hand ? big), while a proprioceptive state is described by the reverse order (e.g. painful ? hand).

I will further examine different types of proprioceptive expressions in these languages and demonstrate an existence of a continuum among the relevant expressions; some are typical example of proprioceptive state (e.g. ‘being happy’ and ‘having a headache’) while others resemble more like external objective state (e.g. ‘numbness’). Discovery of a unifying principle across the two languages will lead us to consider a fundamental cognitive organization that affects language structure.

Finally, I will propose some significant implications of the findings for the theories of argument structure and of directionality in grammaticalization.