Sachiko Yamahashi. Japanese Provides a New Relation between Language and the Real World
2010, Kagaku Tetsugaku, 43(1), pp. 1-29.
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Added by: Veronica CibotaruAbstract:
Questioning Aristotle's Idea
In Categories and On Interpretation, Aristotle develops his view on the relation between language and the real world. However, there exist in Japanese words conflicting with the idea. This paper argues that each of the four formal classes of lexically meaningful elements of Japanese defined on their combinability with the nominative case and the tense markers consistently corresponds to the divisions of reality, and shows that the relation of words to the world cannot be predicted from their use in a sentence. Under this analysis, Aristotle's idea, which is based on the “omoma-rhema” distinction, from which the universal “noun-verb” distinction originates, is thrown into a question
Comment: This is a very useful article for students interested in challenging some fundamental assumptions of the Western philosophy of language that originate in Aristotle's writings, but it does presuppose knowledge of the Japanese language.
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