Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Since the inception of the generative approach to linguistic research, the field of theoretical linguistics has made tremendous progress. Various theories have been proposed and developed to account for the universality of the human language faculty. At the same time and to the same end, researchers have made a remarkable contribution to this progress by investigating a wider range of languages, far beyond English and others in the Indo-European family. The field of Japanese linguistics has certainly followed this trend for the last thirty years. Japanese has become one of the most closely examined languages, and serves as a testing ground for theoretical developments in virtually all areas of linguistics. The examination of Japanese has revealed its differences from and similarities to other languages, and this indeed has contributed to the elucidation of linguistic phenomena at the descriptive level, and has led to developments and improvements at the theoretical level. As an example from phonology, the study of Japanese accentual patterns played an important role in the development of autosegmental theory. Moreover, numerous syntactic phenomena such as scrambling, pronominal reference, and passives received different treatments over the years, and a new perspective has emerged that Japanese phrase structure is not as drastically different from English as it was perceived as being ... log in or subscribe to read full text