open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/45234

The Complex Sentence in Nanai : with a Special Focus on Conditionals

日本語

2011-03-25

Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaido University

Northern Language Studies

1

115-138

The goals of this paper are two-fold: first, it aims to present the result of the questionnaire survey for Five Levels of Subordination (Tsunoda 2010) in Nanai, focusing on Causal, Conditional, and Counter-expectational. Second, it aims to provide an empirical account for the choice of different forms of Nanai conditionals, by making use of corpus data. Nanai has three major forms that encode conditional relations. One is analytical, and the other two make use of converbs. This paper examines each of these three forms and how they are differentiated. tǝi ǰobom-ba ｛xoǰɪ-ɪ osɪnɪ / xoǰɪ-pɪ / xoǰɪ-očɪa-sɪ, ｝ that task-ACC finish-PRS.PTCP OSɪNɪ/finish-COND/finish-COND-2SG gǝsǝ čaj-ja omɪ-nda-go. together tea-ACC drink-DIRINT-COHOR ‘When you have finished the work, let’s drink tea together.’ The three conditional constructions cover different semantic areas. So, even though a similar situation like the sentence above may be encoded by each of these constructions, each construction forces a slightly different semantic interpretation. The typical examples of each construction are as follows. osɪnɪ conditional： agdaasɪ osɪnɪ ičəndəruu. ‘If you don’t believe, go and see it.’ -pI conditional： aopɪ=o sənəxəni. ‘After he slept (for a while), he woke up.’ -OčIA conditional： ǰoagoočɪanɪ ənuiči. ‘When summer comes, they will leave that place.’ These constructions and their characteristics are summarized as follows. ・The osɪnɪ conditional: it is a prototypical conditional construction, and it has a strong modal force that is directed to the hearer, formally manifested in the main clause predicate inflection (especially imperative). It occurs exclusively in conversations, and the subject may be either the speaker or the hearer. It is similar in form and function to Japanese nara. ・The -pI conditional: It may denote sequential events performed by the same subject, a characteristic also common in the simultaneous and anterior converbs. The subordinate clause often denote an action that has a certain duration of time. It is somewhat like Japanese to in terms of function. ・The -OčIA conditional: The conditional clause must take a different subject from that of the main clause, and the subject is a circumstantial element of the event denoted in the main clause. This reminds us of the fact that English when may have a function similar to if. In general, conditional expressions are like topicalization on the one hand, and sequential action on the other. This cross-linguistic observation is confirmed in several conditionals in Nanai and Japanese that we have examined in this paper.

紀要論文

Version of Record

2185-7121

AA12516968