Language Change in East Asia (review)

This volume examines language change in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Representing a wide variety of methodological approaches, the essays are grouped in four sections: dialect studies, sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, and grammar and phonology. The collection is the result of a workshop held at the University of Sheffield’s School of East Asian studies in 1999. In Ch. 1, Tessa Carroll examines the historical expansion of standard Japanese and discusses evidence of increased prestige for local dialects in recent decades. She points out that educational support has been largely withheld from longstanding linguistic minorities and recent immigrants.

In Ch. 2, the first paper on sociolinguistics, Young-Key Kim-Renaud describes the recent use of panmal, a widespread speech style in contemporary Korea. In contrast to beliefs that it is ‘rude’ and ‘simple’, she shows that this set of forms stems from politeness strategies through which speakers have created newly grammaticalized endings. Thomas McAuley continues the analysis of honorifics in Ch. 3, comparing forms from The tale of Genji and The Makioka sisters. He shows that honorific usage is widespread and plays a major role in developing the former text but holds that in the latter, more recent text, these forms are less important and reflect a relative, rather than absolute, honorific system. In Ch. 4, the final sociolinguistics study, Mieko Philips deals with sentence-final forms in informal conversations among Japanese females. Her analysis shows that young women use fewer feminine-sounding forms than do their older counterparts and that they are not influenced by the addressee’s sex. Her methodology and suggestions for future research will be useful in pursuing work on gender and language.

Ch.5, by Kazuko Matsumoto, begins the text’s section on contact linguistics. Matsumoto pulls from an ethnographic questionnaire conducted in 1997 and 1998 to provide a sociolinguistic sketch of the new Western Pacific nation of Palau, making this work the first investigation of contact-driven language shift in a Palauan community. Also involving Japanese, Ch. 6, by Nicolas Tranter, examines some of the earliest known writing in Japan, a wooden slat from the Asuka period (552–645). Tranter reproduces both sides of the slat, ‘cockroach’ and ‘bear’, named after the first character on each, and speculates that this artifact represents Chinese as pronounced as a foreign language and used in imperial administration and high literature.

The next two papers examine cultural influences on loanwords and borrowing. Karen Steffen Chung shines in Ch. 7, showing that recent Japanese loans entering Taiwan’s Mandarin vocabulary actually have Chinese as their original source. In Ch. 8, Tranter examines the development of scripts of written vernaculars, calling into question traditional assumptions about family tree diagrams. Both essays demonstrate that the assertion of speaker identity can play a pivotal role in contact dynamics.

Ch. 9 begins the unit on grammar and phonology with an analysis of eighth-century texts. Edith Aldridge examines a specific type of Japanese writing that used Chinese characters for semantic value but was decoded back into Japanese. Identifying an encoding process, Aldridge shows that word order was systematic rather than a mistake-ridden imitation of Classical Chinese. In Ch. 10, Taeko Goto employs a generative framework to analyze the morphosyn-tactic development of Japanese. Goto traces and describes the development of tense/aspect markers from lexical verbs and identifies factors responsible for their disappearance.

Ch. 11, by Andrew Simpson and Xui-Zhi Zoe Wu, examines the crosslinguistic distribution of the morphemes de, no, and kes. They suggest that these elements are related, explaining differences in syntactic properties as different stages of grammaticalization. The stimulating and diverse collection ends with Ch. 12. Here Youngjun Jang asserts that both the /t/ to /l/ change found in Sino-Korean loanwords and examples of ‘t-irregular’ conjugation in Modern Korean...