Japanese Linguistics

Japanese Linguistics

Japanese linguistics in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures provides both breadth and depth in introducing a wide range of Japanese linguistics to students. Its courses focus on training students in the activity of "doing linguistics," from recognizing and construing a problem to framing a hypothesis, through data collection and analysis to arguing a position on that problem. Students are guided in developing both spoken and written presentation skills for in-class and professional presentations as well as for publication.

Our program is strong in historical linguistics, pedagogical linguistics, and synchronic linguistics, both theoretical and experimental. In historical linguistics, our strengths lie in the prehistory of Japanese, morphology and phonology, grammar/discourse interfaces, and issues in grammaticalization. In synchronic linguistics, faculty specialize in syntax, syntax-semantics interface, pragmatics, discourse/conversation analysis, lexical and sentence processing, the psycho- and sociolinguistics of the writing system, language acquisition, and language-culture interfaces.

Graduate students with a linguistic concentration are expected to be familiar with both earlier and present-day Japanese, possess a general knowledge of the varieties of Japanese, and develop specific knowledge on selected aspects of the language. They are expected to demonstrate understanding of linguistic theories and identify the implications of their findings, and the ability to use research tools to obtain and analyze salient data.

Other departments within OSU provide our students opportunities for study beyond what is available in DEALL. These include Cognitive Science, Communication, Computer & Information Science, English, Education, French & Italian, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Linguistics, Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, Philosophy, Psychology, Slavic & East European Languages & Literatures, Spanish & Portuguese, and Speech & Hearing Science.

Mineharu Nakayama

JJ Nakayama, a trained linguist, is interested in different aspects of the Japanese language. He has been investigating the status of dropped elements such as subjects and objects (empty categories), in particular, questioning what the status of those dropped elements is, how they are interpreted, acquired, processed, used, and so on. He is currently investigating the interpretations of anaphoric expressions by American JFL learners and Japanese EFL learners. He is also looking into Japanese sentences produced by both native and non-native speakers of Japanese. Recently, he has been investigating the relationship between working memory and sentence difficulties. He is the Editor of the "Journal of Japanese Linguistics" since 2005. He has written "Acquisition of Japanese Empty Categories" and edited "Issues in East Asian Language Acquisition", and "Sentence Processing in East Asian Languages", among others. He also co-edited "Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics Vol. 2: Japanese" (Cambridge University Press). Another interest of his lies in Japanese culture; He served as a cultural advisor for a local Ohio TV station that covered the 1998 Nagano Olympic Games. He has also created, developed, and served as the resident director of the biannual OSU Japanese Study Abroad Program in Kobe since its beginning in 1994. He is the recipient of the 1998 Office of International Education Outstanding International Faculty Award, and served as the director of the Institute for Japanese Studies during 2002-2005 and the acting director of the East Asian Studies Center in 2004. He was the East Asian Studies MA Program Graduate Studies Chair during the 2006-7 academic year and is the DEALL Graduate Studies Chair during the 2007-8 academic year.

Mari Noda

A specialist in East Asian language pedagogy, Mari Noda is primarily interested in curriculum, material development, and assessment. She directs and teaches in SPEAC (Summer Programs East Asian Concentration), which currently offers training in teaching of Japanese and Chinese and intensive Japanese and Chinese languages. Her recent publications include A Performance-based Pedagogy for Communicating in Cultures (co-author, Matthew B. Christensen, National East Asian Language Resource Center at The Ohio State University, 2002) and Acts of Reading (co-author, Hiroshi Nara, University of Hawaii Press, 2003). She is the content designer of the Interactive CD-ROM for Japanese: The Spoken Language Part 1 (Yale University Press). She is currently developing the intermediate to advanced level software to accompany Japanese: The Spoken Language Parts 2 and 3. She is President-elect of the Association of Teachers of Japanese and chair of its SIG on Study Abroad for Advanced Skills (SAFAS). She serves as the faculty advisor and coach for the OSU Aikido Club and Nihongo Osyaberi-kai.

Charles Quinn

Charles Quinn teaches courses in Japanese language, language pedagogy, classical Japanese, and linguistics. His work in pedagogy, like that of several DEALL colleagues, seeks to more fully conceptualize language as a cultural phenomenon, and to develop instructional practices that answer to that conceptualization. For example, for a learner to build a lexicon that will eventually support real, coherent creativity appears to require a rich and varied, hands-on experience in which words have time to become associated with their many voices: their prosodies, their syntactic and collocational affinities, their likely speakers and purposes, and more. Another pedagogical challenge that Japanese culture confronts us with is in helping learners develop a reliable feel for socially apt ways of referring to themselves and others. Socially apt reference depends on, among other things, an awareness of where one should “stand” vis-à-vis one’s referent and addressee, on which topics, in which settings, for which purposes, and so on. Over the history of Japanese, personal reference has been attuned in fundamental ways to epistemic differences, such as who knows what and who is positioned to claim knowledge of what—which has made practicing it rather different from personal reference in, say, English. To grow reliable memories of this sort takes effort, the help of imaginative pedagogical design, and time—another truth that's inconvenient enough to often be ignored.

Quinn’s interest in "everyday genres" of talk and text in the pedagogy of today’s language has a parallel in his studies of classical Japanese, in the semi-regular ways in which purposes, audiences, words, and grammar mutually implicate one another. The "pentad" of act, scene, agent, agency and purpose that Kenneth Burke introduced and developed in his Grammar of motives makes a similar point. If an adept reader of any genre is attuned to these mutual associations, identifying and exemplifying them in significant numbers of text tokens seems like good pedagogy for classical Japanese, too. A book underway, Classical Japanese in context: a reader's rhetoric of grammar, aims to explore the consequences of this

Quinn has written interpretive studies of the grammatical and discourse functions of inflected form in earlier Japanese; the kakari-musubi construction; auxiliaries ki and keri as evidentials; and sentence-final mo in Old Japanese. Others of his studies examine the derivation and subsequent grammaticization of sentence-final particles so/zo and ka and inflecting adjectives (keiyoosi).

James Unger

J. Marshall Unger chaired academic departments at the University of Hawai’i, University of Maryland, and the Ohio State University from 1988 to 2004, and has been a visiting professor/researcher at Kobe University, Tsukuba University, the University of Tokyo, and the National Museum for Ethnography in Senri, Japan. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Japan Foundation (twice), and several research grants. He is the author of Studies in Early Japanese Morphophonemics (1977, 2nd ed. 1993), The Fifth Generation Fallacy (1987, Japanese ed. 1992), Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan (1996, Japanese ed. 2001), and Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning (2004). He led the team that produced A Framework for Introductory Japanese Language Curricula in American High Schools and Colleges in 1993 as part of a joint College Board-NEH project coordinated by the National Foreign Language Center. His articles and reviews have appeared in such fora as Language, Word, Diachronica, Journal of Japanese Studies, Monumenta Nipponica, Journal of Asian Studies, Japanese Language & Literature, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Modern Language Journal, and he has been invited to speak in Japan, China, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Denmark as well as at many events in the United States. Avocationally, Unger is a trustee of Chamber Music Columbus, plays piano in amateur chamber ensembles, and is ranked as an amateur 2-dan in go.