J. Marshall Unger

Unger, J. Marshall 2014 Chapter 8. Old Japanese bigrade paradigms and Korean passives and causatives Paradigm Change: In the Transeurasian languages and beyond, Robbeets, Martine and Walter Bisang (eds.), pp. 177–196 | Chapter

There is a consensus that two Old Japanese (OJ, 8th c. ce) verb paradigms, called bigrade, were not present in proto-Japanese (pJ, 1st millennium BCE). There is less agreement on how the bigrades originated and how many unitary pJ vowels their reconstruction requires. I argue here that bigrade… read more

Unger, J. Marshall 2013 Zipf and morphemes: A reply to Sproat Written Language & Literacy 16:1, pp. 112–114 | Article

Unger, J. Marshall 2013 Chapter 15. A possible grammaticalization in Old Japanese and its implications for the comparison  of Korean and Japanese Shared Grammaticalization: With special focus on the Transeurasian languages, Robbeets, Martine and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), pp. 341–354 | Chapter

Double-negative periphrastic litotes have been for nearly three centuries the usual way to express necessitive predicates in Japanese and Korean. These constructions do not, however, go back to the earliest stages of these languages and should not be invoked as evidence of a possible common origin.… read more

Unger, J. Marshall 2011 What linguistic units do Chinese characters represent? Written Language & Literacy 14:2, pp. 293–302 | Article

Using the Internet and spreadsheet software, it is now easy to compare word and character counts for modern and literary Chinese based on very large corpora. It turns out that word counts comply with Zipf’s Law whereas character counts do not. This constitutes novel statistical evidence against… read more

Unger, J. Marshall 2008 Two Japanese Vegetable Names Borrowed From Korean Korean Linguistics 14, pp. 223–229 | Article

Abstract. Neither J suzuna 'turnip' nor suzusiro 'radish' has a good J-internal etymology. But suzuna is similar in form to OK *swuy 'turnip' + *s + *no 'greens'. Likewise, suzusiro resembles OK *swuy + *s + *silay 'radish' (cf. silayki 'dried radish leaves'). Since turnips and radishes in China… read more

Unger, J. Marshall 2008 Early Japanese lexical strata and the allophones of /g/ Proto-Japanese: Issues and Prospects, Frellesvig, Bjarke and John Whitman (eds.), pp. 43–53 | Article

Unger, J. Marshall 2007 The Peopling of East Asia: Putting together archaeology, linguistics and genetics. Edited by Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench, & Alicia Sanchez-Mazas Diachronica 24:1, pp. 199–204 | Miscellaneous

Unger, J. Marshall 2005 Internal reconstruction in Hungarian Diachronica 22:1, pp. 109–154 | Article

An internal reconstruction of Hungarian based mostly on the morphophonemic alternations of the modern language yields dramatically different results from those obtained from a purely synchronic approach to the same data. This article presents such a reconstruction and argues that the striking… read more

Unger, J. Marshall 2003 Substratum and adstratum in prehistoric Japanese Language Contacts in Prehistory: Studies in Stratigraphy, Andersen, Henning (ed.), pp. 241–258 | Article

Unger, J. Marshall 1997 Review of Frellesvig (1995): A Case Study in Diachronic Phonology: The Japanese Onbin Sound Changes Diachronica 14:2, pp. 363–366 | Review

Unger, J. Marshall 1983 Real-time hangul input on the PLATO: computer-based education system Korean Linguistics 3, pp. 145–157 | Article

Unger, J. Marshall 1980 Revision of proto-Korean-Japanese *s Korean Linguistics 2, pp. 91–96 | Article

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