Japanese linguistics, The Japanese language I (original) (raw)

2020, Journal of Japanese Linguistics

Since the 1960s, a renewed interest for Japanese linguistics has produced a number of publications, including scientific articles, books and monographs, both in English and in the Japanese language, and the field of Japanese linguistics in general, and of its sub-fields (phonetics, grammar, syntax, etc.) in particular are quite wellcovered: Miller (1967), Tsujimura (1999, 2013), Iwasaki (2002), Miyagawa and Saito (2008), Hasegawa (2014) to name but a few. Nevertheless, this new publication by Irwin and Zisk (2019) may also serve as a significant contribution to the field for reasons that are illustrated below. Although the book is designed as a vade mecum for undergraduate students with some knowledge of general linguistics, there are several features in this publication which might be profitable for Japanese linguists to take notice of, especially those who are writing or willing to write on this subject in English. This publication is a very informative and wide-ranging overview of the field of Japanese linguistics, which shows an unusually broad and comprehensive covering of many issues, including some units on Braille (pp. 123-125), public signage (pp. 131-133) and non-verbal communication (pp. 177-179). The book is divided into eight chapters, each comprising several units for a total of 86. The first chapter is an introductory overview of Japanese, its typology, its history and its affiliation. It rightly emphasizes that Japanese is only one subbranch of the so called Insular Japonic. The other Japonic languages, once spoken in the Korean peninsula and recorded in fragmentary evidence, consisting mostly of toponyms, form instead the Peninsular Japonic branch of the Japonic family. In the past, it was customary to regard Japanese as a unique language, but, as the authors rightly underline in this volume, Japanese is a typical SOV language, with adjectives and genitives preceding the substantive, and postpositions in place of of prepositions. This is in line with the typological generalizations about constituent order formulated in the 1960s by Joseph Greenberg. The second chapter deals with phonology and phonetics, and includes many topics such as consonants, vowels, phonotactics as well as discussions on suprasegmental features such as pitch-accent (units 2.6, 2.7).