Data di Pubblicazione:
2008
Citazione:
Semantic roles in teaching Japanese verbal constructions / S. Dalla Chiesa. ((Intervento presentato al 12. convegno EAJS International Conference tenutosi a Lecce nel 2008.
Abstract:
In most of Japanese language textbooks, verbal constructions are traditionally explained without reference to any overall case assignment system or verbal prototypes. This compels the students to memorizing verbs and their case particles' sets one at a time, and then leaves them alone in making generalizations and building their own mental verb classes. While teaching Japanese verbs to students, I found out that introducing the notion of semantic roles and using it to build graphical representations of verbal prototypes is of great heuristic power, and improves a student's general understanding of the language and of its logic. In this paper I want to introduce to my colleagues the several graphical representations of Japanese predicate classes that I have devised so far. I will start from the traditional "balloon" diagram, which came to me via the "Teramura school" of Tsukuba University but is ultimately based on Fillmore's case grammar. This easily understandable diagram shows in a simple way both the argument and case structures of single verbs and of predicates' classes. However, it may not easily adapted to showing the linking of arguments to semantic roles, and is clearly suitable only for beginner students. I will then move to the possible variants of the "balloon" diagram and to more refined graphical representations, ending up with introducing a complex chart involving a number of columns and variables. The first column lists the arguments or entities taking part in an given event type, each coupled with one or more semantic roles. Next to it, several columns are dedicated to the predicates that may describe that same event. Each column shows the case particle(s) assigned by its verb to each of entities/arguments involved in the event. One single table can thus be used to show the role and case structures of a predicate such as, for instance, osie, in both its triadic an diadic (kodomo o osieru) constructions, as well as of its two conversive verbs osowar and nara(w). In this case, the table will easily show why the assignment to one same entity of both a source and a (secondary) agentive role will lead, in the construction of the conversives osowar and nara(w), to its surface marking by either an oblique agentive case or by an ablative case. Multiple constructions and alternations of a number of other predicates may also be explained in this way.
After introducing these tables, I will briefly discuss their theoretical foundations. In particular, the complex chart described above may actually be interpreted as a graphical representation of events, here considered not so much as the linguistic, verb-conditioned, description of happenings, but as phenomena ontologically independent from the predicates used to describe them. From this approach it does naturally follow that semantic roles are to be taken with a non-indexing function, so that more than one role can be assigned to a single argument and that a given role can be assigned to more than one argument.
Tipologia IRIS:
14 - Intervento a convegno non pubblicato
Keywords:
semantic roles Japanese language teaching
Elenco autori:
S. Dalla Chiesa
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