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Paper short abstract:

While English language publications on Japanese linguistics have increased in recent years, the lack of a standard for glossing Japanese examples has created a major barrier for researchers. In this talk, we will present a user-friendly glossing standard for Modern and Classical Japanese.

Paper long abstract:

The past decade has brought a major surge in English language publications on the Japanese language and linguistics, as evidenced by such comprehensive series as the Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics (De Gruyter Mouton, 2015–) or the soon to be commenced English language journal of the Society for Japanese Linguistics, Language in Japan (2023–). The lack of established translations for much of the terminology specific to Japanese linguistics and a standard for transcribing and adding morphemic glosses to Japanese examples in English publications, however, has created a major barrier for researchers wishing to publish their work in English.

The KAKENHI project “Development of a multilingual dictionary of Japanese linguistics terminology and a glossing standard for Japonic languages” was launched in 2019 as an attempt to overcome such a barrier. After four years of continued progress, its members have succeeded in creating a multilingual dictionary containing translations from English and other major languages of over 5,000 common terms from Japanese linguistics and a glossing standard for both Modern Standard Japanese and Classical Japanese. Currently, we are working on glossing standards for several major dialects and Ryūkyūan languages.

This presentation will provide an overview of the progress of our project, focusing on our glossing standard for Classical and Modern Japanese. Our glossing standard follows the basic principles set forth by the Leipzig Glossing Rules, while providing numerous conventions specific to Japanese, such as how to treat particles or where to draw the morpheme boundaries between the stems of verbs and their suffixes. A defining feature of our standard is that it includes a list of all of the major (and many minor) functional morphemes from Classical and Modern Standard Japanese together with three-letter glossing labels for each morpheme. Our standard also provides a detailed set of guidelines on how to add period-appropriate phonemicizations to Japanese sources from all periods of the language from Old Japanese to Modern Japanese. It is our hope that by making this standard widely available to researchers both inside and outside of Japan, it will promote a more active discourse on Japanese linguistics in English.