Abstract
One of the several thousand Chinese characters used to write Japanese is MA, whose native reading is /ma/. 1 When given its Sino-Japanese reading this character is often glossed ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ (Nelson 1974, 220) and something like this is indeed one of its meanings when given its native reading as well. However, when given its native reading, MA figures most prominently in two constructions in which it is prefixed to nouns, and perhaps adverbs and adjectives. 2 The nature of these two processes, and in particular the meaning of these uses of MA, is the topic of this essay. I hope to show that both processes share a common semantics, namely that of selection of the prototype.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Poser, W.J. (1991). Ma. In: Georgopoulos, C., Ishihara, R. (eds) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3818-5_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3818-5_23
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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