Linguistic Areas in East Asia: Exploratory Study of Language Contact between Japanese, Korean, and Manchu (prefinal)

Vít Ulman

Abstract:

This paper mainly focuses on possible linguistic areas in East Asia, or more precisely on the
hypothetical linguistic area consisting of Japanese, Korean and Manchu. This paper remains agnostic
towards the existence of the hypothetical Altaic language family and instead focuses on the possible
contact induced similarities shared by the aforementioned languages. This paper presents a
macrotypological overview of the relative typological difference between these languages, and then
follows by presenting two areas of morphosyntax where the search after the contact induced features
seem the most fruitful: case markers and complex predicates.