Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics [HJLL]

The UNESCO atlas on endangered languages recognizes the Ryukyuan languages as constituting languages in their own right. This represents a dramatic shift in the ontology of Japan’s linguistic make-up. Ryukyuan linguistics needs to be established as an independent field of study with its own research agenda and objects. This handbook delineates that the UNESCO classification is now well established and adequate. Linguists working on the Ryukyuan languages are well advised to refute the ontological status of the Ryukyuan languages as dialects. The Ryukyuan languages constitute a branch of the Japonic language family, which consists of five unroofed Abstand (language by distance) languages.The Handbook of Ryukyuan Languages provides for the most appropriate and up-to-date answers pertaining to Ryukyuan language structures and use, and the ways in which these languages relate to Ryukyuan society and history. It comprises 33 chapters, written by the leading experts of Ryukyuan languages. Each chapter delineates the boundaries and the research history of the field it addresses, comprises the most important and representative information.

Applied linguistics is the best single label to represent a wide range of contemporary research at the intersection of linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, to name a few. The Handbook of Japanese Applied Linguistics reflects crosscurrents in applied linguistics, an ever-developing branch/discipline of linguistics. The book is divided into seven sections, where each chapter discusses in depth the importance of particular topics, presenting not only new findings in Japanese, but also practical implications for other languages. Section 1 examines first language acquisition/development, whereas Section 2 covers issues related to second language acquisition/development and bilingualism/multilingualism. Section 3 presents problems associated with the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Section 4 undertakes questions in corpus/computational linguistics. Section 5 deals with clinical linguistics, and Section 6 takes up concerns in the area of translation/interpretation. Finally, Section 7 discusses Japanese sign language. Covering a wide range of current issues in an in an in-depth, comprehensive manner, the book will be useful for researchers as well as graduate students who are interested in Japanese linguistics in general, and applied linguistics in particular.

Chapter titles

Chapter 1. Cognitive Bases and Caregivers' Speech in Early Language Development (Tamiko Ogura, Tezukayama University)
Chapter 2. Literacy Acquisition in Japanese Children (Etsuko Haryu, University of Tokyo)
Chapter 3. Age Factors in Language Acquisition (Yuko Goto Butler, University of Pennsylvania)
Chapter 4. Cross-lingual Transfer from L1 to L2 Among School-age Children (Kazuko Nakajima, University of Toronto)
Chapter 5. Errors and Learning Strategies by Learners of Japanese as an L2 (Kumiko Sakoda, Hiroshima University/NINJAL)
Chapter 6. Adult JFL Learners' Acquisition of Speech Style Shift (Haruko Minegishi Cook, University of Hawai'i at Manoa)
Chapter 7. Japanese Language Proficiency Assessment (Noriko Kobayashi, Tsukuba University)
Chapter 8. The Role of Instruction in Acquiring Japanese as a Second Language (Kaoru Koyanagi, Sophia University)
Chapter 9. The Influence of Topic Choice on Narrative Proficiency by Learners of Japanese as a Foreign Language (Masahiko Minami, San Francisco State University)
Chapter 10. CHILDES for Japanese: Corpora, Programs, and Perspectives (Susanne Miyata, Aichi Shukutoku University)
Chapter 11. KY Corpus (Jae-Ho Lee, Tsukuba University)
Chapter 12. Corpus-based Second Language Acquisition Research (Hiromi Ozeki, Reitaku University)
Chapter 13. Assessment of Language Development in Children with Hearing Impairment and Language Disorders (Kiyoshi Otomo, Tokyo Gakugei University)
Chapter 14. Speech and Language Acquisition in Japanese Children with Down Syndrome (Toru Watamaki, Nagasaki University)
Chapter 15. Revisiting Autistic Language: Is "literalness" a Truth or Myth? Manabu Oi (Osaka University/Kanazawa University)
Chapter 16. Towards a Robust, Genre-based Translation Model and its Application (Judy Noguchi, Mukogawa Women's University; Atsuko Misaki, Kwansei Gakuin University; Shoji Miyanaga, Ritsumeikan University; Masako Terui, Kinki University)
Chapter 17. Japanese Sign Language: An Introduction (Daisuke Hara, Toyota Technological Institute)
Chapter 18. Japanese Sign Language Phonology and Morphology (Daisuke Hara, Toyota Technological Institute)
Chapter 19. Japanese Sign Language Syntax (Noriko Imazato, Kobe City College of Technology)
Chapter 20. Sign Language Development and Language Input (Takashi Torigoe, Hyogo University of Teacher Education)

The studies of the Japanese language and psycholinguistics have advanced quite significantly in the last half century thanks to the progress in the study of cognition and brain mechanisms associated with language acquisition, use, and disorders, and in particular, because of technological developments in experimental techniques employed in psycholinguistic studies. This volume contains 18 chapters that discuss our brain functions, specifically, the process of Japanese language acquisition - how we acquire/learn the Japanese language as a first/second language - and the mechanism of Japanese language perception and production - how we comprehend/produce the Japanese language. In turn we address the limitations of our current understanding of the language acquisition process and perception/production mechanism. Issues for future research on language acquisition and processing by users of the Japanese language are also presented.

Chapter titles

1. Learning to become a native listener of Japanese (Reiko Mazuka)

2. The nature of the count/mass distinction in Japanese (Mutsumi Imai & Junko Kanero)

3. Grammatical deficits in Japanese children with Specific Language Impairment (Shinji Fukuda, Suzy E. Fukuda, & Tomohiko Ito)

4. Root infinitive analogues in Child Japanese (Keiko Murasugi)

5. Acquisition of scope (Takuya Goro)

6. Narrative development in L1 Japanese (Masahiko Minami)

7. L2 acquisition of Japanese (Yasuhiro Shirai)

8. The modularity of grammar in L2 acquisition (Mineharu Nakayama & Noriko Yoshimura)

9. Tense and aspect in Japanese as a second language (Alison Gabriele & Mamori Sugita Hughes)

10. Language acquisition and brain development: Cortical processing of a foreign language (Hiroko Hagiwara)

11. Resolution of branching ambiguity in speech (Yuki Hirose)

12. The role of learning in theories of English and Japanese sentence processing (Franklin Chang)

13. Experimental syntax: word order in sentence processing (Masatoshi Koizumi)

14. Relative clause processing in Japanese: psycholinguistic investigation into typological differences (Baris Kahraman & Hiromu Sakai)

15. Processing of syntactic and semantic information in the human brain: evidence from ERP studies in Japanese. (Tsutomu Sakamoto)

16. Issues in L2 Japanese sentence processing: similarities/differences with L1 and individual differences in working memory (Koichi Sawasaki & Akiko Kashiwagi-Wood)

17. Sentence production models to consider for L2 Japanese sentence production research (Noriko Iwasaki)

18. Processing of the Japanese language by native Chinese speakers (Katsuo Tamaoka)

This volume is the first comprehensive survey of the sociolinguistic studies on Japanese. Japanese, like other languages, has developed a highly diverse linguistic system that is realized as variation shaped by interactions of linguistic and social factors. This volume primarily focuses on both classic and current topics of sociolinguistics that were first studied in Western languages, and then subsequently examined in the Japanese language. The topics in this volume cover major issues in sociolinguistics that also characterize sociolinguistic features of Japanese. Such topics as gender, honorifics, and politeness are particularly pertinent to Japanese, as is well-known in general sociolinguistics. At the same time, this volume includes studies on other topics such as social stratification, discourse, contact, and language policy, which have been widely conducted in the Japanese context. In addition, this volume introduces "domestic" approaches to sociolinguistics developed in Japan. They emerged a few decades before the development of the so-called Labovian and Hymesian sociolinguistics in the US, and they have shaped a unique development of sociolinguistic studies in Japan.

Contents

Part I: History
Chapter 1: Research methodology
Florian Coulmas
Chapter 2: Japan and the international sociolinguistic community
Yoshiyuki Asahi and J.K. Chambers
Chapter 3: Language life
Takehiro Shioda

Part II: Sociolinguistic patterns
Chapter 4: Style, prestige, and salience in language change in progress
Fumio Inoue
Chapter 5: Group language (shūdango)
Taro Nakanishi
Chapter 6: Male-female differences in Japanese
Yoshimitsu Ozaki

Part III: Language and gender
Chapter 7: Historical overview of language and gender studies: From past to future
Orie Endo and Hideko Abe
Chapter 8: Genderization in Japanese: A typological view
Katsue A. Reynolds
Chapter 9: Feminist approaches to Japanese language, gender, and sexuality
Momoko Nakamura

Part IV: Honorifics and politeness
Chapter 10: Japanese honorifics
Takashi Nagata
Chapter 11: Intersection of traditional Japanese honorific theories and Western politeness theories
Masato Takiura
Chapter 12: Intersection of discourse politeness theory and interpersonal Communication
Mayumi Usami

Part V: Culture and discourse phenomena
Chapter 13: Subjective expression and its roles in Japanese discourse: Its development in Japanese and impact on general linguistics
Yoko Ujiie
Chapter 14: Style, character, and creativity in the discourse of Japanese popular culture: Focusing on light novels and keitai novels
Senko K. Maynard
Chapter 15: Sociopragmatics of political discourse
Shoji Azuma

Part VI: Language contact
Chapter 16: Contact dialects of Japanese
Yoshiyuki Asahi
Chapter 17: Japanese loanwords and lendwords
Frank E. Daulton
Chapter 18: Japanese language varieties outside Japan
Mie Hiramoto
Chapter 19: Language contact and contact languages in Japan
Daniel Long

Part VII: Language policy
Chapter 20: Chinese characters: Variation, policy, and landscape
Hiroyuki Sasahara
Chapter 21: Language, economy, and nation
Katsumi Shibuya

This volume is the first comprehensive English handbook on Japanese dialects. The study of Japanese dialects has a rich tradition, contributing to fields like geolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and phonology. While influenced by Western linguistics, Japanese dialectology has also made significant original contributions through extensive fieldwork and compilation of dialect dictionaries and atlases. Most studies have been published in Japanese, allowing only a handful of foreign specialists to take full advantage of the achievements in Japanese dialectology. This handbook addresses that gap, making dialect data and analyses available to a broader audience and informing specialists about Japanese dialectology's methods and achievements. It focuses on mainland dialects, including the Hachijō language, while a separate handbook covers the Ryukyuan languages, now regarded as sister languages of Japanese.

The Handbook of Japanese Contrastive Linguistics is a unique publication that brings together insights from three traditions—Japanese linguistics, linguistic typology and contrastive linguistics—and makes important contributions to deepening our understanding of various phenomena in Japanese as well other languages of the globe. Its primary goal is to uncover principled similarities and differences between Japanese and other languages of the globe and thereby shed new light on the universal as well as language-particular properties of Japanese. The issues addressed by the papers in this volume cover a wide spectrum of phenomena ranging from lexical to syntactic and discourse levels. The authors of the chapters, leading scholars in their respective field of research, present the state-of-the-art research from their respected field.

The volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of pragmatics), representing a range of ideas and approaches that are currently most influentialin these fields. The studies are organized around a model that has long currency in traditional Japanese grammar, whereby the linguistic clause consists of a multiply nested structure centered in a propositional core of objective meaning around which forms are deployed that express progressively more subjective meaning as one moves away from the core toward the periphery of the clause.

The volume seeks to achieve a balance in highlighting both insights that semantic and pragmatic theory has to offer to the study of Japanese as a particular language and, conversely, contributions that Japanese has to make to semantic and pragmatic theory in areas of meaning that are either uniquely encoded, or encoded to a higher degree of specificity, in Japanese by comparison to other languages, such as conditional forms, forms expressing varying types of speaker modality, and social deixis.

Studies of Japanese syntax have played a central role in the long history of Japanese linguistics spanning more than 250 years in Japan and abroad. More recently, Japanese has been among the languages most intensely studied within modern linguistic theories such as Generative Grammar and Cognitive/Functional Linguistics over the past fifty years. This volume presents a comprehensive survey of Japanese syntax from these three research strands, namely studies based on the traditional research methods developed in Japan, those from broader functional perspectives, and those couched in the generative linguistics framework.
The twenty-four studies contained in this volume are characterized by a detailed analysis of a grammatical phenomenon with broader implications to general linguistics, making the volume attractive to both specialists of Japanese and those interested in learning about the impact of Japanese syntax to the general study of language. Each chapter is authored by a leading authority on the topic. Broad issues covered include sentence types (declarative, imperative, etc.) and their interactions with grammatical verbal categories (modality, polarity, politeness, etc.), grammatical relations (topic, subject, etc.), transitivity, nominalizations, grammaticalization, word order (subject, scrambling, numeral quantifier, configurationality), case marking (ga/no conversion, morphology and syntax), modification (adjectives, relative clause), and structure and interpretation (modality, negation, prosody, ellipsis).

Chapter titles

Introduction
Chapter 1. Basic structures of sentences and grammatical categories, Yoshio Nitta, Kansai University of Foreign Studies
Chapter 2: Transitivity, Wesley Jacobsen, Harvard University
Chapter 3: Topic and subject, Takashi Masuoka, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
Chapter 4: Toritate: Focusing and defocusing of words, phrases, and clauses, Hisashi Noda,
National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics

Chapter 5: The layered structure of the sentence, Isao Iori, Hitotsubashi University
Chapter 6. Functional syntax, Ken-Ichi Takami, Gakushuin University; and Susumu Kuno, Harvard University
Chapter 7: Locative alternation, Seizi Iwata, Osaka City University
Chapter 8: Nominalizations, Masayoshi Shibatani, Rice University
Chapter 9: The morphosyntax of grammaticalization, Heiko Narrog, Tohoku University
Chapter 10: Modality, Nobuko Hasegawa, Kanda University of International Studies
Chapter 11: The passive voice, Tomoko Ishizuka, Tama University

Chapter 12: Case marking, Hideki Kishimoto, Kobe University

Chapter 13: Interfacing syntax with sounds and meanings, Yoshihisa Kitagawa, Indiana University

Chapter 14: Subject, Masatoshi Koizumi, Tohoku University

Chapter 15: Numeral quantifiers, Shigeru Miyagawa, MIT
Chapter 16: Relative clauses, Yoichi Miyamoto, Osaka University
Chapter 17: Expressions that contain negation, Nobuaki Nishioka, Kyushu University
Chapter 18: Ga/No conversion, Masao Ochi, Osaka University
Chapter 19: Ellipsis, Mamoru Saito, Nanzan University

Chapter 20: Syntax and argument structure, Natsuko Tsujimura, Indiana University

Chapter 21: Attributive modification, Akira Watanabe, University of Tokyo
Chapter 22: Scrambling, Noriko Yoshimura, Shizuoka Prefectural University

This volume presents a comprehensive survey of the lexicon and word formation processes in contemporary Japanese, with particular emphasis on their typologically characteristic features and their interactions with syntax and semantics. Through contacts with a variety of languages over more than two thousand years of history, Japanese has developed a complex vocabulary system that is composed of four lexical strata: (i) native Japanese, (ii) mimetic, (iii) Sino-Japanese, and (iv) foreign (especially English). This hybrid composition of the lexicon, coupled with the agglutinative character of the language by which morphology is closely associated with syntax, gives rise to theoretically intriguing interactions with word formation processes that are not easily found with inflectional, isolate, or polysynthetic types of languages.

This volume is the first comprehensive handbook of Japanese phonetics and phonology describing the basic phonetic and phonological structures of modern Japanese with main focus on standard Tokyo Japanese. Its primary goal is to provide a comprehensive overview and descriptive generalizations of major phonetic and phonological phenomena in modern Japanese by reviewing important studies in the fields over the past century. It also presents a summary of interesting questions that remain unsolved in the literature.

The volume consists of eighteen chapters in addition to an introduction to the whole volume. In addition to providing descriptive generalizations of empirical phonetic/phonological facts, this volume also aims to give an overview of major phonological theories including, but not restricted to, traditional generative phonology, lexical phonology, prosodic morphology, intonational phonology, and the more recent Optimality Theory. It also touches on theories of speech perception and production.

This book serves as a comprehensive guide to Japanese phonetics and phonology for all interested in linguistics and speech sciences.

This volume will be the first full-length exploration in any language of the details of the history of the Japanese language written by experts in the different subfields of linguistics. Overall, while including factual and background information, the volume will focus on presenting original research of lasting value. This includes presenting the latest research on better studied topics, such as segmental phonology, accent or focus constructions, as well as both introducing areas of study which have traditionally been underrepresented, such as syntax or kanbun materials, and showing how they contribute to a fuller understanding of all of the history of Japanese.