Foreword

With this volume, Acta Linguistica Asiatica is entering its 3rd year. After the second half of last year, focusing on research in “Lexicography of Japanese as a Second/Foreign Language” we begin this year with selection of papers covering various perspectives and languages, from South Asian Languages, via Indian subcontinent and China all the way to Japan. The first paper, by Pritha CHANDRA and Anindita SAHOO, entitled Passives in South Asian Languages, discusses continuum of passive constructions, spreading over three language families , Indo-Aryan (Oriya), Dravidian (Malayalam) and Austro-Asiatic (Kharia), and forming a kind of sprachbund, based on a generalized notion of passive. This approach also shows that Tibeto-Burman languages such as Meitei and Ao also can be said to have passives. The second paper, by Kalyanamalini SAHOO, entitled Politeness Strategies in Odia, discusses the conceptual basis for politnesess strategies in Odia (spelled also Oriya as in the first paper), pointing out inadequacy of Brown and Levinson’s model of politness, and proposing a new, “community of practice” based model of politeness for Odia. The next two papers deal with neologisms in Chinese language. LIN Ming-chang in his paper A New Perspective on the Creation of Neologisms focuses on the language user’s psychological requirements for devising neologisms, and therefore proposes a new research perspective towards the reasons for devising neologisms. Mateja PETROVČIČ in her paper The Fifth Milestone in the Development of Chinese Language investigates the structure and features of neologisms in the last century. The author suggests that the widening gap between rich and poor should be considered as the fifth milestone for changes in Chinese language. In the fifth paper, We Have It too: A Strategy Which Helps to Grasp the Japanese Writing System for Students from Outside of the Chinese Character Cultural Zone, the author, Andrej BEKEŠ, argues for employment of analogy transfer strategies to help beginner learners of Japanese to overcome cognitive and affecctive blocade when facing the complexities of Japanese writing system