Lives in Linguistics

I did not know until a few days ago that video-tapled conversations in "Lives in Linguistics" (an interview series by Professors John R. "Haj" Ross and John A. Goldsmith) were downloadable through iTunes U. The first speaker (interviewee) is Professor Lila Gleitman with University of Pennsylvania (a Past President of LSA). What she says there (e.g., how she got involved in linguistics, her first linguistics teacher Zellig Harris, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) is so interesting that approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes will pass in a moment. I especially enjoyed this video, for I played a tour guide when she visited Tokyo in 1999 and knew her in person.

To launch iTunes U, please click here. (An audio file is also available)

P.S. (as of December in 2011) Thanks to Haj and John, interviews with the following linguists are viewable also:

[1. Lila Gleitman] 2. Catherine V. Chvany, 3. Jerry Sadock, 4. John Goldsmith, Haj Ross, & Francois Dell, 5. Theo Vennemann.

James D. McCawley talks about the Hangul writing system (thanks to Professors Mark Turner & Haj Ross)

A Student's Introducation to English Grammar by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum

My posts on this blog are largely on the Japanese language (thus far), so that some of you may think that I am uninterested in English (or else I am not trained as a specialist of English). In fact, I have been studying, thinking about, and writing about English, and I hope to develop a career-long interest in various aspects of that language. If you are a college student majoring in English, let me recommend that you read Professors Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum's (2005) A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (Cambridge University Press) for a start. To my knowledge, it is one of the best student textbooks for English grammar. I learned a lot. (For Japanese students: この本には『ケンブリッジ現代英語文法入門』という邦訳があります。横浜国立大学の高橋邦年先生が監訳されたものですが、申し分のない完成度です。英語で読むのが大変であればこの邦訳もお薦めです。）

Japanese productive causative sentences are not biclausal (but in fact bipropositional and this is not a mere notational variant).

Following Yuhara (2009, 2010), this short paper again touches on a problem in generative studies of the Japanese language that has persisted to the degree that it no longer can be considered an oversight or misunderstanding. While the past fifty years of intensive research under transformational generative grammar has revealed many important characteristics of Japanese, I am of opinion that the language has also been misanalyzed by a group of linguists strongly associated with Cambridge, MA who have casually adopted Eurocentric conceptions of grammar and pushed them to the limit and beyond. This squib deals with one consequence of such syntactic analyses, a widely-accepted claim that Japanese productive causative sentences are biclausal. It is my contention that they are in fact bipropositional and that this difference is by no means a mere notational variant in much of generative linguistic theorizing.

(downloadable from here)

Revisiting Kuroda's (1978) Linear Case Marking [LCM] hypothesis

In memory of S.-Y. Kuroda, I gave a paper titled "Kuroda's (1978) Linear Case Marking hypothesis revisited" at the 19th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (University of Hawaii at Manoa, November 12-14). The abstract is downloadable by clicking here.

S.-Y. Kuroda (1934-2009)

Sige-Yuki Kuroda, Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Linguistics at UCSD, died in La Jolla, California, on February 25, 2009, after a long illness. Known almost universally as Yuki, Kuroda was the father of modern Japanese linguistics. His 1965 MIT dissertation, Generative Studies in the Japanese Language, written under the direction of Noam Chomsky, provided the seeds of theoretical studies of Japanese that continue to have an impact today.

Click here to jump to a tribute webpage, from which the above obituary is cited. I am deeply saddened.

The campus where I was intellectually stretched

Yuhara 2008 Chicago Dissertation

Title: A Multimodular Approach to Case Assignment in Japanese: A Study of Complex and Stative Predicates.

Author: Ichiro Yuhara
Advisor: Jerrold M. Sadock (Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor)
Additional Committee Members: Amy Dahlstrom (Associate Professor), Jason Merchant (Associate Professor)

ABSTRACT

The primary goal of my dissertation is to challenge “syntactocentrism” in mainstream generative grammar and alternatively to advance a multimodular view of analysis that de-synthesizes much of explanatory role attributed to syntax as empirically more successful and conceptually more reasonable. With particular reference to various morphological case manifestations in Japanese complex and stative predicates, this dissertation argues for a parallel grammatical architecture, sketched in Sadock (1985, 1991) and Jackendoff (1997, 2002), in which participant role structure (cf., D-Structure) and function-argument structure (cf., LF) (among others) stand on equal footing with syntactic structure (cf., S-Structure).
I propose that the distribution of morphological case particles is a function of corresponding rules, which hierarchically relate overt nominal expressions to participant roles and arguments across distinct grammatical modules. The main components of the dissertation (Chapters 3 and 4) are thus intended to develop a non-derivational, constraint-based case system that generates the canonical case arrays in Japanese and at the same time also regulates theoretical possibilities that are non-existent in reality.

In a detailed comparison of the standard analyses in derivational theories, I also question strong “isomorphism” between levels of representation and the validity of dichotomic theoretical concepts such as syntax-lexicon, subject-object, transitive-intransitive, biclausal-monoclausal, and unergative-unaccusative, which are arguably based on the structure of Modern English. In my view, uncritical or unwitting applications of them to various syntactic phenomena of Japanese have greatly distorted the logic of the language and/or complicated the resulting analyses. This dissertation claims that by untangling many complexities in syntax and placing them into the right grammatical components, it should be possible to argue that such complexities arise from the interaction of fairly simple mechanisms in language, which are totally autonomous of each other.