Foreword
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| Title | Foreword |
| Authors | |
| Abstract | In line with the journal policy, the present issue of ALA, the last this year, also includes also a paper in Slovene. While striving for an active, open and engaged dialogue with the scientific trends in the research of Asian languages around the world, ALA, as the sole scientific journal devoted to Asian linguistics in Slovenia, also has set before itself the goal to cultivate critical scientific thought and terminology in this field among Slovenian speakers by providing in one of the issues every year also research and technical articles in Slovenian, for the Slovenian reading public, above all for undergraduate students and the interested public at large. This has been a tradition and, I would say, also a duty, respected and eagerly put in practice by those of us who do science, including linguistics, in the context of a relatively small language community, that of Slovenian speakers. The present issue begins with two papers concerned with the perception of phonological and phonetic differences between languages. The first paper, by Ashima AGGARWAL, deals with the acquisition of Hindi voicing and aspiration contrasts by monolingual English speakers in the framework of Optimality theory. The main result, that English learners do perceive aspiration distinction but not voicing contrast, also bears on adult learning of second languages in general. In the second paper, Nina GOLOB examines differences in Japanese and Slovene prosody i.e., accent and intonation, from a phonological point of view. The study shows that there are phonological differences behind some superficial phonetic similarities in the examined phenomena, which represent a difficulty in the acquisition of L2 prosody. In the next paper, Abolfazl MOSAFFA JAHROMI examines the syntactic behaviour of in, an expletive-like morpheme in Persian, and argues in favour of the existence of expletives in Persian, a language which has hitherto generally been considered to have no expletives. The fourth and fifth paper deal with categorisations. The fourth paper deals with typological categorisation based on event framing strategies in Old Chinese and Old Japanese. On the basis of an analysis of available data, Wenchao LI concludes that while Old Chinese employed verb framing, satellite framing and equipollent framing, verb framing was its main pattern, while in Old Japanese all three patterns were employed comparably. The fifth paper, by Sumi YOON, deals with discourse categorisation of Japanese and Korean, both generally considered as “listener-responsible” languages. By analysing apologies in conversations by Japanese and Korean students, both those in their home country and those studying in the US, the author argues for a recategorization of Korean as a “speaker-responsible language”. In the technical article, in Slovene, at the end of this issue, Andrej BEKEŠ investigates the classification of genres in Japanese corpora, based on recent research he has also been involved in. He argues that various modal expressions, such as suppositional adverbs, may provide an interesting base for such classification. |
| Publisher | Faculty of Arts |
| Date | 2012-01-23 |
| Source | Acta Linguistica Asiatica Vol 1, No 3 (2011) |
| Rights | Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) |