Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
12 Frames of reference, eff ects of motion, and lexical meanings of Japanese front/back terms
Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
Kazuko Shinohara
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
Yoshihiro Matsunaka
Tokyo Polytechnic University
Description
In this chapter, the authors aim to consider these issues by examining the uses and meanings of three Japanese spatial lexemes mae (front), ushiro (back), and saki (front/ahead). The analysis and empirical data presented here will support Levinson’s position and Tyler and Evans’s position stated above. In the remainder of this paper, the authors first review relevant previous studies and present our goal in Section 2. Then we examine unmarked uses of these lexemes in Section 3. In Section 4, our experiment on these lexemes is reported. Finally, Section 5 concludes this study.