I am teaching morphology

This quarter, I am teaching morphology at a prestigious college. It's wonderful to see the bright students beginning to understand various aspects of the multiply ambiguous word "word." Some of them are even beginning to say that a tense affix and a (tense) phrase are strange bedfellows… (young minds are too good…)

The Grammatical Structure of Modern Japanese: Morphology (Ueno 2016)

I will start translating Yoshio Ueno's『現代日本語の文法構造・形態論編』into English. It definitely deserves a wide audience. 

New Student Fellowship Launched in Honor of Yuki Kuroda

Let me cite an announcement for a new fellowship launched in honor of Yuki Kuroda.

The LSA is pleased to announce the establishment of a new student fellowship in honor of the late S.-Y. (Yuki) Kuroda. LSA member Susan Fischer has generously provided the founding contribution of $50,000 for the fund in memory of her late husband, Dr. Kuroda. We invite LSA members and colleagues of Drs. Fischer and Kuroda to make additional contributions to help us reach our goal of raising a total of $85,000 to fully endow the fellowship fund. This new student fellowship will be reserved for linguistics students from Japan to attend the LSA's biennial summer Linguistic Institute. It will cover tuition, travel, lodging, and board. Preference will be given to Japanese who haven't yet started studying in the US.

現代日本語の文法構造・統語論編（上野義雄著）

早稲田大学理工学術院・上野義雄先生の最新作。昨年末に『形態論編』が出たばかりだが、その姉妹版『現代日本語の文法構造・統語論編』をご紹介。

日本で言語学を勉強する場合、英米文学科あたりで英語学の訓練を受け、大学院でも英語学を専攻することが多い。そうすると英語の構造には詳しくなるのだが、母語である日本語の構造については独学になったり、あるいは無意識に英語の分析を当てはめてしまう可能性がある。もし本ブログの読者が「自分、そうです」と思われた場合、日本語の文法構造・統語構造に関してはまずこの本をお読みなることを強くお薦めしたい。

　本書で用いられている枠組み Automodular Grammar (Sadock 1991, 2012) の懇切丁寧に解説のあと、第２章からは「繰り上げ」「コントロール」「受身」「使役」「結果構文」「敬語」「かき混ぜ」と、日本語の主要な統語現象がどのような構造を有しているのか、その分析が続く。分析を正当化するために上野先生が様々な「テスト」をお使いになっているのだが、これがヒジョーに勉強になる。また取り扱われている統語現象も多岐に渡っており、「受身」の第４章は「太郎は先生に褒められた」というような直接受身から始まり、無活用動詞の直接受身、間接受身、無活用動詞の間接受身、持ち主の受身、二重目的語動詞の直接受身、長距離受身、Fpaの直接受身（「〜と言われている」）、凍結目的語の直接受身と、日本語文法に多少なりとも慣れ親しんだ人であれば「日本語の受身って、こんなにあったのか」と驚かれるはず。

　前作と同じく、読み切るには相当の忍耐と知性を必要とするのだが、こうした作品こそが「真の学者の仕事」で「海外の日本語研究者に読ませたい」思わせる一冊。英語タイトルは（もちろん）『More about Japanese Syntax Than You probably Want to Know』である。『形態論編』と合わせ、現代日本語文法の最高峰の一角を成していることを保証します。

　最後にもう１つだけ。「まえがき」に上野先生のお人柄が出ていて面白い。ご留学先で受けた（言語学者としての）訓練について書かれている箇所があるが「ああ、そのとおり」と懐かしく思ってしまった。もしご興味があればここをクリック（名古屋大学のリンクに飛びます）。

History of Linguistics at the University of Chicago (CLS50)

An Automodular View of English Grammar by Yoshio Ueno（*2015 the English Linguistics Society of Japan Prize*)

 

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!!)

Oldest Linguistics Department in the US?

If you are interested in "oldest department of linguistics in the US," Geoffrey K. Pullum's blog entry "But not as early as we were; Chicago strikes back" is informative and useful.

The Modular Architecture of Grammar by Jerrold M. Sadock

Let me use this post to announce Professor Jerrold M. Sadock's new book The Modular Architecture of Grammar (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics No.132). It is the latest version of Automodular Grammar (aka Autolexical Syntax), which he has been developing since early 1980s. To place an order, click here (Cambridge University Press) and/or here (Amazon.com).

What follows is just a digression. At the University of Chicago, I was privileged to work closely with Professor Sadock and became a linguist under his tutelage. In retrospect, it was a truly wonderful experience to be able to see him trying to lead a conflict of ideas to creativity. I am confident that by reading this work, everyone can achieve deep insights into the design of natural language even if s/he has differences in his/her theoretical persuasion. If you are a student of linguistics, I would particularly like you to learn how a first-ranked linguist thinks things in comparison with other grammatical frameworks.

"In this original and creative work, Sadock addresses one of the most fundamental issues in theoretical linguistics, the relationship among the different modules of grammar. He challenges established generative theory by introducing an elegant and well motivated non-derivational model of linguistic organization."
     Jan Terje Faarlund, University of Oslo

"Simply and clearly, Jerrold Sadock presents a new formulation of his idea that grammar is specified by a handful of completely autonomous, parallel modules, demonstrating it with stimulating accounts of major features of English."

     Anthony C. Woodbury, University of Texas at Austin

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