Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

FUJITA TORU, GRADUATE SCHOOL, DOSHISHA UNIVERSITYA CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND JAPANESE COPULAE FROM THEIDEATIONAL PERSPECTIVES OF SFLThis paper will discuss the ideational differences of copulae in English and Japanesewithin the framework of SFL, maintaining that particular languages should bedescribed by their own grammars.Copular verbs can be found in most languages, but their functional characteristicsare not common. The SFL treatment for English analyses the verb be as a typicalexample for copular (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), while the Kyoto Grammar (KG;Tatsuki, 2008) for Japanese considers dearu to be a fundamental copula (Fujita,2010).Whereas the English verb be can function as Process in a clause and realiserelational process, it may also realise existential process in such a clause as God is.In other words, the same verb can be used for two distinct functions: relational andexistential processes.Contrastively in Japanese, dearu may function mostly for realising connectiveprocess, which is a process type proposed in KG that designates connectionbetween two entities. Furthermore, this Process does not usually express existence(stative process) as *Kami wa dearu (God TOP be), though the English equivalentcan construe existence.Accordingly, the analysis where types of processes covered by two similar verbs arenot identical will be a strong support to treat the transitivity systems of the twolanguages separately.PAPER SESSION 1C, ROOM 3 - MONDAY 25 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 74 Lisbon, July 2011