Yoshio Ueno's new book An Automodular View of English Grammar (Waseda University Press) is now available from here. **This book received the English Linguistics Society of Japan Prize in 2015.**
For those who don't know much about the author of this book, let me write a little bit about him. Yoshio Ueno is professor of English at Waseda University, Japan. Originally trained as mathematician, Yoshio found himself attracted to linguistics and earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. His 1994 dissertation, Grammatical Functions and Clause Structure in Japanese, impressed every single member of his dissertation committee (including Jerrold M. Sadock and Amy Dahlstrom), and the work has since become the standard to the subsequent generation of graduate students who work on the Japanese language at Chicago. Reportedly, James D. McCawley (1939-1999) arranged to publish his dissertation from the University of Chicago Press, but he declined it, saying "There is much left to be improved." Several years later, I started the same PhD program. I was naturally advised to study his dissertation carefully. I did. I read his work (approx. 500 pages in two volumes) until I managed to understand by taking copious notes on many pages. I can thus assure you that there was NOTHING to be improved in his dissertation. On the contrary, it was a work of master syntactician with intellectual independence. The level of scholarship he manifested on nearly every page was just amazing.
I have utmost confidence that Yohio's new book significantly improves and contributes to current linguistic research, which has (in my view) long lost touch with reality. For specialists and non-specialists alike, I recommend it without reservation. This book received the English Linguistics Society of Japan Prize in 2015. (Congratulations!! I knew it!!)
