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Paper short abstract

This study uses model-based Bayesian clustering on data for 200 concepts in 120 lects, to produce a fine-grained classification of the Ryukyuan languages. Both macro and micro evolution are investigated, by analysing various combinations of lexical data and regular sound correspondences.

Paper long abstract

The general subdivision of the Ryukyuan branch of Japonic is well-established, with a main split between Northern and Southern lects, which in turn are divided into Amami and Okinawa on the one hand, and Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni on the other (see e.g. Pellard 2015; De Boer 2020). Yet, many open questions remain around the fine-grained classification (although see e.g. Lawrence 2000; 2006 on Yaeyama and Okinawa, respectively; and Pellard 2009 on Miyako). This study will contribute to our understanding of the classification of Ryukyuan by using computational methods on high-resolution data.

Computational historical linguistics has provided new insights into the structure, age, and spread of language families. However, advances made by these approaches are largely built on lexical data, and unraveling the relations between the closely related varieties continues to pose a challenge, as lexical differentiation can be limited in contexts of more recent diversification–as is the case for Ryukyuan. Recent work has explored various additional data types as a source of phylogenetic signal, including phoneme inventories (Dockum 2017), phonotactics (Macklin-Cordes et al. 2021; Huisman et al. 2025) and pitch accent (Takahashi et al. 2023). Even so, the integration of regular sound correspondences–which form the cornerstone of the Comparative Method in traditional historical linguistics–remains limited. The study introduces a new approach to computationally extract and evaluate sound correspondences, which is used on a new comparative linguistic database of the Ryukyuan language in which all entries are segmented, aligned, and coded for cognacy.

The data is analysed with model-based Bayesian clustering methods as used in population genetics, to infer the clusters that best describe the data. Crucially, individuals can be admixed from multiple populations, which can account for horizontal transfer through historical contact. To understand both macro and micro level patterns of divergence in Ryukyuan, separate analyses are conducted for: 1) basic vocabulary; 2) non-basic vocabulary; 3) the complete vocabulary data; 4) sound correspondences; 5) sound correspondences together with basic vocabulary; and 6) sound correspondences together with the complete vocabulary data. The results are compared against previously suggested subdivisions of each major Ryukyuan subgroup.

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Paper short abstract

This study aims to present and analyse the epic works translated from Japanese into Hungarian between 1945 and 1990 from the prespective of translation studies. Focus will be placed on the translators and the translation strategies used in this period of time.

Paper long abstract

This study aims to present and analyse the epic works translated from Japanese into Hungarian between 1945 and 1990 from the prespective of translation studies.

Initially, works were translated from Russian, German, English and French. However, as Japanese language teaching spread, translations from Japanese began to appear, particularly from the late 1960s onwards.

During the period under review, more than 40 novels, short story collections and a folk tale anthology were published, alongside more than 50 of individual short story translations were published in various journals. Translated authors included major 20th century Japanese literary figures such as Kōbō Abe, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the Nobel laureates Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburō Ōe, Ōgai Mori, and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Additionally, the first Japanese novel, Shikibu Murasaki's The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book by Shōnagon Sei were also translated in this period.

The study is twofold: 1) it examines which authors were translated during this period, how the works were selected, who the translators were, what intermediate languages the translations were made from, and what common features characterize the translations published in this era. 2) through a short parallel corpus compiled of source and target language texts, we highlight specific translation norms and strategies, with particular emphasis on realia, forms of address, transcription, and possible omissions or mistranslations.

Keywords: translation studies, prose translation, translation strategies

References:

Judit Vihar (2009): A japán irodalom megjelenése Magyarországon 1989-ig The Reception of Japanese Literature in Hungary until 1989). In.: (Farkas Ildikó, Szerdahelyi István, Umemura Yuko, Wintermantel Péter szerk.) Tanulmányok a magyar-japán kapcsolatok történetéből. Budapest: Eötvös Kiadó, 383-404.

Sato Noriko (2001): A japán kultúra fogadtatása Magyarországon. (Reception of Japanese Culture in Hungary). In: Tudományos Évkönyv 2001. Budapesti Gazdasági Főiskola, 308-316.

György Radó (2001): Hungarian Tradition. In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Mona B. (ed.). London ad NY: Routledge. 448-456.

István Bart and Sándor Rákos ed. (1981): A műfordítás ma (Literary Translation Today). Budapest: Gondolat Kiadó.

Lóránt Tarnóczi (1966): Fordítókalauz. A szakirodalmi fordítás elmélete és gyakorlata. (The Translator's Handbook: Theory and Practice of Special Literature). Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Kiadó.

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This study examines the increasing use of katakana for personal names in English-language textbooks in Japan, arguing that it signals shifting perspectives. While this shift may empower learners, it also risks reinforcing an inward-looking orientation in their learning experience.

Paper long abstract

This study examines the relationship between script choice and foreign-language education in Japanese society, with particular focus on the script used for personal names in English-language textbooks employed in compulsory education. In doing so, it demonstrates how script mediates shifting perspectives in language-learning experiences. Enhancing English-language skills among the Japanese population has long been a key objective of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). Over the past several decades, MEXT has implemented a series of reforms to the foreign-language education curriculum guidelines. These reforms have included a greater emphasis on communicative competence, increased classroom hours, and an expanded vocabulary syllabus. Changes have also been introduced to the English-language textbooks used in Japanese schools, all of which undergo a certification process by MEXT. It has been observed that these textbooks are increasingly incorporating stories set in Japan and enhancing the representation of Japanese people. Alongside this transformation, the use of Japanese scripts has grown, particularly on introductory pages where main storylines are presented alongside lists of key characters. Non-Japanese names are now rendered in katakana, the Japanese syllabary used for the transliteration of foreign words, whereas previously all names were presented in English spelling using the Roman alphabet. This study scrutinises why katakana has replaced the Roman alphabet and how this shift emblematises broader changes in English-language education in Japan. Through critical discourse analysis, it argues that Japanese scripts represent a Japanese voice, positioning the narrator of the story as Japanese. The script change therefore reflects a shift in English-language discourses in Japan, with greater emphasis on Japanese self-expression directed towards a non-Japanese audience within Japan. While this shift may empower learners by giving them a voice, it also entails an inherent risk. The primary users of these textbooks, both learners and teachers, are envisioned as Japanese, meaning that the shift in perspective occurs exclusively within a Japanese context. Consequently, the use of katakana can be interpreted as a manifestation of an increasingly self-focused and inward-looking orientation in Japanese English-language education.

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Paper short abstract

By examining vowel correspondences across the Japonic languages, this paper argues that /oː/ existed in the earlier Naha vowel system and was raised and merged with /uː/ before the monophthongization: ai, ae > eː and au, ao > oː. Conversely, the evidence suggests that the vowel /eː/ was not raised.

Paper long abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether vowel raising occurred in the mid-long vowels (/eː/ and /oː/) of the Naha dialect of Okinawan, one of the Ryukyuan languages spoken throughout the Ryukyu archipelago in Japan.

It is widely accepted that Ryukyuan underwent a sound change known as Vowel Raising, in which the mid-vowels /e/ and /o/ were raised. In Okinawan specifically, these vowels were raised and merged with /i/ and /u/, respectively. Consequently, a five-vowel system (i, u, e, o, a) shifted to a three-vowel system (i, u, a). However, research on Vowel Raising has typically focused on short vowels, while long vowels have rarely been discussed.

Modern Naha possesses five long vowels (iː, uː, eː, oː, aː). It is generally believed that the mid-long vowels developed later through the monophthongization of two short vowels (ai, ae > eː and au, ao > oː). By conducting a thorough investigation into vowel correspondences across the Japonic languages, this paper argues that /oː/ existed in the earlier Naha vowel system and was raised and merged with /uː/ prior to the monophthongization. Conversely, the evidence suggests that the vowel /eː/ was not raised.

Regarding the vowel /eː/, another question remains. In modern Naha, there are some cases where /eː/ does not regularly correspond to ai or ae in Japonic cognates. A well-known example is the /eː/ in ʔaːkeːdʒuː (‘dragonfly’). While researchers have noted this irregularity, its cause remains unknown. This paper examines the history of /eː/ in this word, alongside two similar cases–naːbeːraː (‘sponge gourd’) and haːbeːruː (‘moth’)–to account for this phenomenon. Our analysis concludes that this /eː/ can be reconstructed as Proto-Ryukyuan *e. Specifically, the /eː/ was originally a short /e/ in earlier Naha that subsequently lengthened. This lengthening must have occurred before the period of Vowel Raising; otherwise, the vowel would have been raised to /i/.

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Paper short abstract

This work presents quantitative-qualitative analysis of perceived kanji difficulty among native speakers and learners of Japanese. Stroke count, radicals, and lexical familiarity were rated high as difficulty predictors, but empirical results show that perception may not correspond to performance.

Paper long abstract

This study investigates how learners and native speakers perceive kanji difficulty, based on 65 detailed survey responses. Participants were presented with five groups of five kanji pairs, each differing in one trait: frequency, stroke count, number of readings, number of meanings, and concreteness of meaning. Before making pairwise judgments, participants indicated which factors they believed most influence difficulty. This design allows comparison between stated beliefs and actual selections, as well as differences between proficiency groups.

Results reveal two key contrasts. First, both learners and native speakers claim stroke count and radicals are primary determinants of difficulty. However, their choices tell a more nuanced story. Learners disproportionately judged kanji with unfamiliar components or multiple readings as harder, while native speakers were more sensitive to subtle visual distinctions and semantic nuance. Across all responses, recognisable components, stroke count, and lexical familiarity emerged as dominant predictors, with mean influence scores above 2.1 on a 0–3 scale. Visual similarity strongly shaped judgments, exemplified by 未/末, where 末 was chosen as harder in 63% of cases, despite being more frequent. This suggest that human perception of frequency may be unreliable. In contrast, formal indicators such as JLPT level (mean 1.03) and school grade of instruction (1.06) were weak predictors, indicating that curricular labels do not match intuitive difficulty.

Qualitative comments reinforce these findings. Learners emphasised memorisation strategies, radicals, and vocabulary exposure, while native speakers mentioned graphical balance and stroke order. Symmetry and overall shape were mentioned but ranked low in quantitative influence. Several participants noted that familiarity through repeated exposure significantly reduced perceived difficulty.

What learners and natives believe is difficult may not correspond to error patterns or acquisition speed. Therefore, the next step is to contrast these perceptual biases with empirical data to identify where intuition diverges from reality.T his research provides a foundation for understanding perceptual bias (mainly overestimation of stroke count importance, and lack of frequency awareness) and its role in shaping effective, data-driven approaches to kanji acquisition.

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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research on Kansai dialect, this paper introduces the concept of linguistic post-standardisation to account for the afterlives of standard language ideology and the growing legitimacy of non-standard speech in highly standardised societies, such as contemporary Japan.

Paper long abstract

In recent decades, regional dialects have become increasingly visible and valorised in media, popular culture, tourism, and everyday interaction in Japan. At the same time, the ideological authority of standard Japanese remains firmly entrenched in public and institutional spaces. Drawing on ongoing debates surrounding the ‘Kansai dialect’, a group of dialects often associated with imagined authenticity, this paper develops the concept of linguistic post-standardisation to address the following question: how can we account for the apparent coexistence of enduring linguistic norms and the growing legitimacy of non-standard speech?

The paper theorises linguistic post-standardisation as a sociolinguistic condition in which standard language ideologies continue to structure linguistic evaluation, while no longer monopolising linguistic value and legitimacy. Based on ethnographic research on Kansai dialect, it examines how non-standard forms are selectively revalued, authorised, and circulated across different social domains, without displacing the symbolic centrality of standard Japanese. Rather than treating Kansai dialect as an exceptional or peripheral case, the analysis approaches it as a diagnostic site for examining broader transformations in how linguistic varieties are valued. In particular, it foregrounds how linguistic value and speaker legitimacy are re-evaluated in a highly standardised society. Building on sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological approaches to enregisterment, indexicality, and cultural value, the paper argues that linguistic post-standardisation captures a reconfiguration of linguistic authority, rather than a linear decline or erosion of standardisation. It accounts for the afterlives of standard language ideology in a linguistically homogeneous society undergoing shifts in linguistic value and legitimacy.

By theorising these dynamics from the Japanese context, this paper contributes to debates in Japan Studies on language, culture, and power, while also offering a conceptual framework that may be applicable to other contexts shaped by strong standard language ideologies.

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Paper short abstract

The paper shows that Japanese linguistics, shaped by European paradigms, was rooted in epistemic violence. It argues that these frameworks enabled internal colonization by constructing kokugo as a national norm while marginalizing Ryūkyūan languages as dialects despite their scientific value.

Paper long abstract

The present paper examines how the advent of modern Japanese linguistics, which was shaped by the transfer, adaptation, and reception of European linguistic paradigms during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is rooted in epistemic violence. Furthermore, it analyzes how these imported epistemologies became embedded in practices of 'colonization within'. Japan's reception of Western linguistic thought is generally depicted as a narrative of modernization. However, this paper contends that the process concurrently engendered forms of epistemic violence that structured the perception, classification and political treatment of non-standard varieties, notably the Ryūkyūan languages.

Drawing on decolonial theory and metapragmatic approaches to language ideology, the paper analyzes how concepts derived from the Junggrammatiker, comparative philology, and nationalist language movements, originally formulated within a European colonial context, were translated into tools for constructing kokugo as both linguistic norm and moral substance of the Japanese nation-state. This epistemic framework did not seek to describe factual linguistic reality but rather actively produced a hierarchical linguistic order by establishing Tōkyō Japanese as the normative center and constructing all other varieties to the status of 'languages of the periphery' and thus 'dialects'.

Within this newly formed epistemic field, the Ryūkyūan languages occupied a paradoxical position: While they were valuable from a scientific perspective in terms of reconstructing historical stages of the Japanese language, they were concurrently classified as dialects in order to support a homogenizing national project. The tension between scientific recognition and political negation illuminates the workings of epistemic violence: the state determining not only what counted as legitimate knowledge but also what was permitted to exist as a 'language'.

The present paper draws on historical documents, early dialect surveys, and metapragmatic discourse to reveal how linguistics in Japan's nation-building reproduced colonial logics internally. The study utilizes an analytical approach to examine the utilization of linguistic categories in the marginalization of the Ryūkyū Islands. This analysis shall offer a decolonial re-reading of Japanese linguistic modernity, emphasizing the persistent influence of these epistemic formations on contemporary discourses concerning the status, revitalization, and cultural legitimacy of the Ryūkyū languages.

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Paper short abstract

This presentation investigates language ideologies in Japanese video game dialogue, using a triangulated approach (developers, texts, and players) to analyse non-human characters’ linguistic representation and user perceptions, offering a new perspective on fictional identity construction.

Paper long abstract

This presentation addresses an underexplored area within pop cultural linguistics, by investigating how language ideologies are reproduced and circulated through the linguistic stylisation of non-human characters in contemporary Japanese video game dialogues. Despite being one the world’s largest video game market, with a distinct media ecosystem shaped by media-mix strategies, the role of Japanese video games in shaping language ideologies remains significantly under-researched. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how specific linguistic varieties contribute to the construction of identity and narrative roles, and how stereotyped registers activate linguistic and metapragmatic stereotypes that influence audience’s perceptions due to the intertextuality of the media mix.

The research engages with the phenomenon of yakuwarigo ‘role language’ (Kinsui, 2000), while integrating Anglo-American sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological perspectives. Through a triangulated approach (author-oriented, text-oriented, and player-oriented), the study investigates both the implicit and explicit processes through which virtual identities are shaped in the videogame medium by language.

The theoretical section provides an overview of existing research on the relationship between language, ideology, and representation in popular culture, with particular attention to indexicality (Eckert, 2008), iconization (Irvine & Gal, 2000), and enregisterment (Agha, 2007), the ideological mechanisms through which specific linguistic forms become recognizable registers associated with fictional speaker categories.

As for the analytical part, the author-oriented analysis draws on interviews with Japanese game developers, offering insights into how creative practices, linguistic attitudes, and genre conventions shape the scriptwriting process and the representation of non-human characters. The text-oriented analysis examines a corpus of Japanese-language video games, analysing stylistic features to understand how fictional registers construct identities and reproduce ideologies. The player-oriented analysis consists of a metapragmatic survey of native Japanese speakers, exploring linguistic attitudes toward fictional registers and the stereotypes that inform their interpretation.

This presentation proposes a more robust and methodologically sophisticated framework for analysing fictionalised orality in Japanese. The findings illuminate the complex intertextual and ideological dynamics that structure mediated communication, contributing to a deeper understanding of how linguistic ideologies and fictional identities are constructed, circulated, and recognised within the videogame context.

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Paper short abstract

VOT data from 103 young speakers across eastern Japan reveal three regional laryngeal patterns, including an aspiration-like system in Tohoku. These findings suggest that voicing- and aspiration-based contrasts can coexist and may be derived from a unified representation.

Paper long abstract

This study investigates the phonological representation of laryngeal source contrasts in Japanese and the regional variation found among younger speakers in eastern Japan. Cross-linguistically, word-initial obstruents are often used to diagnose laryngeal contrasts because this position is prosodically strong and exhibits relatively stable phonetic cues compared with weaker environments such as intervocalic or word-final positions. Previous typological research has examined these contrasts using a range of acoustic parameters, including voice onset time (VOT) (Lisker & Abramson 1964), low-frequency energy reduction during closure, and the presence or absence of F1 cutback.

Within Element Theory (Harris 1994; Backley 2011), stop contrasts are represented with combinations of |ʔ| (closure), |H| (frication/aspiration), and |L| (voicing). Voiceless unaspirated stops (0 VOT) correspond to |ʔH|, voiced stops (−VOT) to |ʔHL|, and voiceless aspirated stops (+VOT) to |ʔHH|. Two-way laryngeal systems are therefore classified either as voicing languages, contrasting |ʔH| and |ʔHL|, or aspiration languages, contrasting |ʔH| and |ʔHH|. Although Japanese has long been analysed as a voicing language (Shimizu 1996), the classification has not been systematically re-examined for younger speakers across different regions.

To address this gap, we measured word-initial VOT values for /b d g/ and /p t k/ produced by 103 native speakers (mean age 20.8 ± 2.4) from Tohoku, Kanto, Chubu, and neighbouring regions. A hierarchical cluster analysis based on mean VOT values revealed three major patterns: Cluster 1 (primarily Kanto–Chubu) showed −17.7 ms for voiced stops and 42.2 ms for voiceless stops; Cluster 2 (Kanto–Hokuriku–Tohoku) showed slightly positive VOT for voiced stops (8.9 ms) with slightly longer voiceless values (42.2 ms); and Cluster 3 (mainly Tohoku) showed consistently positive VOT for voiced stops (15.1 ms) and markedly longer VOT for voiceless stops (59.3 ms). The third pattern points toward an aspiration-type contrast, partly consistent with Takada (2011).

To capture this internally conditioned variation, we propose a unified underlying representation combining properties of |H| and |L|, with regional outcomes derived through selective suppression of one element. Suppressing |L| yields |ʔH| (/d/-like), while suppressing |H| yields |ʔH| (/t/-like). This model predicts that aspiration- and voicing-based systems may coexist within Japanese.

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores shikona (sumo ring names) of salaried wrestlers as a form of linguistic world-building, showing how kanji choice, naming conventions and tradition construct a culturally shared image of Japan within contemporary professional sumo.

Paper long abstract

Shikona, the ring names used by professional sumo wrestlers, constitute a unique form of linguistic creativity embedded in strong institutional and cultural constraints. This paper examines shikona of all active salaried wrestlers (sekitori) in the makuuchi and juryo divisions as of January 2026, treating them as a corpus through which a specific linguistic image of Japan is constructed and maintained.

Drawing on 70 shikona, the study approaches these names not as isolated lexical items, but as culturally loaded signs operating at the intersection of language, tradition, and collective imagination. Particular attention is paid to kanji selection, recurrent morphemes (e.g. references to mountains, natural phenomena, animals, virtues, or auspicious concepts), inherited naming patterns, and the balance between individual identity and institutional continuity.

Methodologically, the paper combines the concept of the linguistic image of the world with culturally informed interpretation, while explicitly addressing the risk of over-interpretation inherent in symbolic readings of proper names. Rather than reconstructing individual intent, the analysis focuses on shared conventions and dominant semantic fields, understood as elements of a broader discursive system within professional sumo.

The preliminary findings suggest that shikona contribute to a coherent linguistic representation of Japan that emphasizes continuity, strength, natural imagery, hierarchy, and tradition, while selectively accommodating regional references and limited signs of individual distinction. As such, shikona function not merely as identifiers, but as performative linguistic constructs that reinforce a culturally recognizable vision of “Japaneseness” within the ritualized space of sumo.

The paper is intended as a foundation for further detailed analysis and aims to demonstrate the relevance of shikona as a valuable source for studying language, culture, and identity in contemporary Japan.

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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the sentence-final particle sa within Relevance Theory. It argues that sa encodes procedural meaning that attributes an utterance’s explicature to shared general beliefs, yielding obviousness and detachment, and explains its incompatibility with evidentials and copula.

Paper long abstract

This paper adopts Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) as its theoretical framework and aims to account for the semantic and grammatical properties of the Japanese sentence-final particle (SFP) sa. It assumes that SFPs encode procedural meaning and contribute to utterance interpretation. On this basis, the paper proposes that sa functions as a marker that attributes the explicature of an utterance to what may be called “general beliefs.”

In this paper, general beliefs are understood as a socially shared body of reflective beliefs, drawing on Sperber’s (1997) distinction between intuitive and reflective beliefs. Attributing an utterance to such beliefs allows the speaker to shift responsibility for the explicature away from the individual self and present it as grounded in shared knowledge. This strategy is assumed to be motivated by the speaker’s attempt to overcome the hearer’s epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010), facilitating acceptance of the explicature.

Under this analysis, the semantic properties traditionally associated with sa, such as obviousness and detachment (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 1951), can be systematically explained. By attributing the explicature to general beliefs, sa presents the proposition as obvious or taken for granted, while signaling reduced speaker commitment. This dual effect gives rise to the detached or observational nuance characteristic of sa.

Furthermore, the paper argues that this attributional analysis provides a unified explanation for two well-established grammatical facts documented by the Japanese Descriptive Grammar Research Group (2003). First, sa is known not to co-occur with evidential modality expressions such as yō da and rashii. Second, sa cannot appear with the copula in nominal predicate sentences. These restrictions are treated not as independent constraints, but as consequences of the attributional function of sa. Since evidential expressions likewise involve attribution, their co-occurrence with sa results in a mismatch in attributional function. Similarly, the attributional use of sa is assumed to be blocked by constraints that the copula imposes on propositional attitudes. In this analysis, the copula in nominal predicate sentences is assumed to restrict the range of propositional attitudes available in utterance interpretation, making the attributional function of sa unavailable in such environments.

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Paper short abstract

In Early Middle Japanese, predicates lacking tense-aspect suffixes are tenseless: time reference is inferred from boundedness (presence/absence of a temporal boundary). Bounded clauses are perfective and refer to specific past episodes; unbounded clauses report regularities concerning the present.

Paper long abstract

Narrative prose predominantly reports past events. Yet ninth–eleventh-century Classical Japanese prose contains remarkably few instances of the past tense suffixes -ki and -keri (e.g. ariki-ki, ariki-keri ‘walked’) relative to the number of past-time situations in the texts. Instead, past-time reference is typically associated with the perfective suffixes -tsu and -nu, or left without overt tense–aspect marking (i.e. zero-marked).

Many predicates referring to past events therefore lack tense–aspect morphology (e.g. ariku ‘walked’). Although zero-marked predicates may refer to past or present time, the grammatical principles determining their temporal construal—and their aspectual profile more generally—have remained largely unexplained.


In this paper, I argue that zero-marked predicates instantiate one of two aspectual profiles: one correlates with present-time reference, the other with past-time reference. In a wider study of 700 Classical Japanese examples, I show that, in the absence of overt tense–aspect marking, temporal construal is inferred pragmatically from boundedness—that is, the presence or absence of implicit or explicit reference to a temporal boundary within the clause. I identify boundedness on the basis of boundary cues (e.g., temporal adverbials of position, or overt specification of a preceding or following event).


Bounded clauses yield episodic perfective construal and are understood as referring to specific past events; unbounded clauses yield imperfective habitual/generic construal and are understood as reporting regularities concerning the present.

The two aspectual profiles are exemplified below. In the first example, the predicate 過ぐ sugu denotes a bounded situation and is understood as referring to a past episode:


またの日、山の端に日のかかるほど、住吉の浦を過ぐ。


“On the following day, just as the sun was setting behind the mountain ridge, we passed by Sumiyoshi Bay.”
 (Sarashina Nikki)


In the second, the predicate 食ふ kuu denotes an unbounded situation and is construed as a habit (imperfectively) related to the narrative present.


こと物は食はで、ただ仏の御おろしをのみ食ふか。


“Do you refrain from eating ordinary food and eat only altar offerings?”
(Makura no Sōshi, §83)

Collectively, these patterns indicate that zero-marked predicates in Early Middle Japanese are genuinely tenseless, with past or present time reference emerging from a systematic interaction between aspectual profile and pragmatic interpretation. These findings support an analysis of Early Middle Japanese as a tenseless language.

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Paper short abstract

This presentation traces recurring pragmatic patterns in press-conference interaction, showing how speakers use role-specific linguistic resources to delimit accountability, manage stance, and regulate topic accessibility in situ.

Paper long abstract

This presentation offers an interactional-pragmatic analysis of Japanese political press conferences, focusing on how institutional roles are indexed and managed through language. It draws on press conference transcripts by Sanae Takaichi from May to September 2024, a period marked by role overlap, during which she simultaneously served as a cabinet minister while positioning herself as an ambitious figure within the ruling party. This configuration provides a particularly revealing context for examining how institutional positioning shapes linguistic choice as interaction unfolds.

Adopting a functional-pragmatic discourse perspective, the presentation concentrates on recurrent linguistic patterns rather than isolated statements or ideological claims. Central attention is given to role indexicality and to how it structures stance-taking and epistemic authority. One recurring pattern involves frame-indexing expressions that define the press conference as a bounded interactional space (ba 場), thereby limiting topic eligibility and setting clear expectations about what counts as an appropriate contribution. Another concerns explicit role self-reference (for example, speaking “as a minister”), which recalibrates footing and narrows epistemic scope, allowing speakers to suspend personal stance without issuing a direct refusal.

Pragmatic deflection is further realised through speaker de-centering strategies, including the delegation of epistemic authority to higher institutional actors and the use of depersonalised grammatical constructions. These practices shift responsibility away from the individual speaker and anchor accountability in institutional hierarchy rather than personal intention. Across the corpus, such strategies consistently neutralise affect and constrain evaluative stance, making it possible to handle potentially contentious issues within the limits of institutional interaction.

Rather than treating these practices as evasive, the presentation shows that pragmatic deflection operates as a regularised interactional mechanism grounded in role-specific language use. Institutional constraints emerge not simply as external pressures on speech, but as effects that are produced and sustained through patterned pragmatic choices. In this sense, agency is not suppressed by institutional language, but reconfigured through disciplined footing and carefully managed stance-taking.

This presentation aims to contribute to research on Japanese pragmatics and institutional discourse, illustrating how political accountability and authority are negotiated through everyday linguistic practice in highly regulated interactional settings.

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Paper short abstract

This study investigates referential density in the history of Japanese using manually annotated data and corpus analysis. I demonstrate a diachronic increase in overt argument realisation and show that it is conditioned by morphosyntactic change, genre and register variation, and language contact.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates referential density (RD) in the history of Japanese, asking how reference is distributed across overt argument NPs, pronominal forms, and morphology. Building on Bickel’s (2003) RD1 (overt argument NPs per available argument positions) and Noonan’s (2003) RD2 (overt arguments per verb), I introduce two indices capturing the referential contribution of exaltation morphology (keigo): RDex1 (markers per available arguments) and RDex2 (markers per verb).

Because RD is best assessed in extended discourse, the Old Japanese (OJ) component draws on the only substantial prose sources, Shoku-Nihongi Senmyō and Engi-shiki Norito, alongside their Contemporary Japanese translations. I triangulate the annotated results with corpus evidence (Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese and Kainoki Treebank), and extend the analysis to Early and Late Middle Japanese (EMJ – LMJ) materials spanning courtly narrative, diary prose, and contact-mediated didactic and translation prose.

Two findings stand out: (i) RD1 is broadly stable, while RD2 increases diachronically, indicating more overt arguments per predicate in later stages; and (ii) RDex decreases, reflecting reduced reliance on exaltation morphology as a referential resource.

The EMJ – LMJ comparison shows that, alongside morphosyntactic change, genre and register strongly condition RD. Courtly narrative and performative registers sustain low RD via morphology-mediated reference tracking and topic continuity, whereas expository and didactic prose favours overt NPs. Detailed annotation of Heike Monogatari suggests that exaltation-related effects on argument realisation are construction-sensitive, clustering in specific predicate morphologies and discourse environments.

Finally, I argue that language contact adds further pressure towards overt reference. Late Middle Japanese Christian translation prose, rich in light-verb constructions (LVCs) with Sino-Japanese verbal nouns, reshapes predicate packaging and argument expression. Likewise, post-Meiji contact with European languages correlates with increased pronoun use and more explicit participant tracking in translated and modern written styles. Methodologically, the paper highlights challenges in annotating zero forms and morphology-driven reference in historical corpora, and the resulting limits of corpus-only RD measures.

This study forms part of my DPhil project on reference tracking and argument realisation in Japanese.

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Paper short abstract

Recently, some studies have proposed an evidential view of the Japanese -teiru form, arguing that it does not primarily express aspectual meanings but indicates information observable to the speaker. Focusing on visual expressions with mieru/mie-teiru, this study argues that this view is plausible.

Paper long abstract

Traditionally, the semantic function of the Japanese -teiru form has been analyzed primarily as expressing aspectual meanings. In contrast to this dominant view, several recent studies, including Sadanobu (2006), argue that the core meaning of -teiru lies in indicating that the information at issue in a given utterance is observed by the experiencer. From this perspective, -teiru can be regarded as expressing evidentiality in the sense that it specifies observation as the source of information.

While there may be room for discussion as to whether expressions describing information observed at the time of speech should fully count as evidential markers, adopting this observation-based interpretation of -teiru offers a promising way to provide a unified account of the wide range of meanings associated with this form. To illustrate this point, the present study focuses on visual expressions involving the mieru and mie-teiru forms, including the examples in (1)–(4), and examines in detail the contexts in which these expressions are appropriately used and the meanings they convey. Through this, the study investigates how the -teiru contributes to meaning in different types of visual expressions.

(1) a. Konya wa ama-no-gawa ga mieru. ‘The Milky Way is visible tonight.’

  b. Konya wa ama-no-gawa ga mie-teiru. ‘Tonight, (I can) see the Milky Way.’

(2) a. Natsu ni wa ama-no-gawa ga yoku mieru. ‘The Milky Way is clearly visible in summer.’

  b. *Natsu ni wa ama-no-gawa ga yoku mie-teiru.

(3) a. *Ano bokusā wa aite no panchi ga mieru.

b. Ano bokusā wa aite no panchi ga mie-teiru. ‘That boxer is reading his opponent’s punches.’

(4) a. Aite no panchi ga mieru. ‘(I) can read the opponent’s punches.’

  b. Watashi wa aite no panchi ga mie-teiru. ‘(I realize that) I can read the opponent’s punches.’

The analysis shows that, at least in visual expressions, the observability of the relevant information plays an important role in shaping the meanings conveyed by the sentence in the -teiru form. In conclusion, the study claims that approaches which view -teiru as an evidential expression may be effective in deepening our understanding of the semantics of -teiru.

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Paper short abstract

This study analyzes the language of 9th-century Japanese glossed Buddhist texts to show how translators presented complex narratives and compelling dialogue using vernacular Japanese temporal morphemes (e.g., -ki, -tu, & -tari), nominalizations (e.g., -aku), and sentence-final expressions (-keri).

Paper long abstract

The earliest examples of complex narratives in Japanese are found in 9th-century CE translations of Literary Sinitic Buddhist texts rendered via gloss. The linguistic variety of Late Old Japanese found in these narratives arose from transposing and reciting Literary Sinitic texts in Japanese and is as old as the act of reading itself in Japan. Although most of these sutras originated in India, they arrived in Japan already translated into Literary Sinitic. To render these texts in Japanese, translators had to add tense, aspect, modality, honorifics, nominalizations, and other markers to predicates and case particles to nouns. Furthermore, to preserve their translations in writing they used diacritic markings between, and occasionally on, the source texts’ sinographs to denote the appropriate Japanese phonology and morphosyntax. This paper examines morphological marking in these Japanese renditions of Buddhist texts to explain how tense and aspect markers, such as -ki, -tu, -nu, -tari, and -(a)ri, create narrative frames in discourse and how nominalizations and other sentence-final expressions, such as -aku, -mono zo, and -keri, are added to create natural dialogue in Japanese. By examining the frequency of the above temporal markers in relation to narrative structure and the emotional states of characters using the above expressions in dialogue, it uses qualitative and quantitative linguistic analyses to show how practitioners engaged in sutra translation in early Heian Japan employed vernacular narrative techniques with maximum rhetorical force to best present these texts to a domestic audience.

Keywords: Late Old Japanese, Kundokubun, Translation, Narrative Structure, Emotion

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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes a comparative sociolinguistic reorientation of minoritized languages in Japan, shifting focus from description to lived language use. Drawing on global revitalization cases, it highlights community-driven practices that challenge implicit “post-standard” monolingual ideologies.

Paper long abstract

Although recent developments in the sociolinguistics of the Japanese archipelago have shifted focus to linguistic varieties other than hyōjun-go, scholarly discussion often tends to privilege linguistic description over sustained engagement with the lived experiences of speaker communities, resulting in minoritized languages being treated as objects of documentation rather than as socially-embedded, dynamic practices with contemporary relevance and potential for revitalization.

This paper argues for a theoretical reorientation that situates minoritized languages in Japan within a comparative sociolinguistic perspective. Through the comparative lens, this paper discusses minoritized languages (regional dialects, Ainu language, Ryūkyūan languages, and the languages of immigrants) in a linguistically "post-standardized" Japan – where though a standard language ideology is not overtly expressed, it still implicitly foregrounds beliefs about language use in everyday life.

Revitalization experiences such as Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, Hakka in Taiwan, and Guaraní in Paraguay, highlight how languages and speakers have been revalorized through shifts in ideology, institutional support, and public presence. These post-standardization cases demonstrate that revitalization and ideological changes are not a singular endpoint but an ongoing, multi-layered process extending beyond policy to include everyday language use, education, media, governance, and national-symbolic narratives.

While a similar process is occurring in Japan, this paper calls for shifting scholarly focus to minoritized language speaker communities (language use rather than description), examining how linguistic and ideological changes reflect wider social changes. We foreground bottom-up, community-driven approaches to revitalization, emphasizing the role of local actors and place-based practices, arguing that attention to space, place, and lived experience can illustrate how linguistic practices are intertwined with regional histories, identities, and material environments. These practices, when made visible in public spaces, can challenge the post-standardization of implicit monolingual ideologies.

Adding diverse cases from the Japanese archipelago to a global context creates an opportunity to move towards a more community-centered approach to language use, positioning Japanese minoritized languages as a crucial piece of the broader comparative puzzle. We call for the further expansion of the scope of Japanese sociolinguistics through greater engagement with power, value, community agency, and recognition that these languages are active, dynamic components of social life.

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Paper short abstract

This paper introduces a corpus based on two Waka-kanbun sources, the Kōzanjibon Koōrai and the Owari no kuni Gebumi. Kunten annotations enable reliable corpus construction as Japanese text. The corpus is encoded in XML with morphological annotation and will be released as “CHJ Wakan Konkōbun”.

Paper long abstract

This presentation reports on the construction and publication of a corpus of kundoku texts based on two historical sources: the Kōzanjibon Koōrai and the Owari no kuni Gebumi. Both are written in Waka-kanbun (Japanized classical Chinese) and are valuable for research on the history of Japanese written styles. However, relatively few Waka-kanbun materials in existing corpora are organized in a form that is readily usable for sustained philological and linguistic analysis.

To address this gap, our project is building a corpus for the Insei period (c. 11th-12th centuries) annotated version of the Kōzanjibon Koōrai and the CE 1325 annotated version of the Owari no kuni Gebumi. Although the base texts themselves are in Waka-kanbun, they preserve rich reading information through kunten marks from the Insei and Kamakura periods (c. 12th-14th centuries), respectively. This makes it possible to establish readings for most passages and to construct them into a Japanese corpus.

The Kōzanjibon Koōrai, preserved in Kōzanji Temple’s repository, is a collection of model letters reflecting the lives of aristocrats and officials in the late Heian period (c. 10th-12th centuries). The manuscript includes katakana kunten added in a consistent hand by an unknown compiler. The Owari no kuni Gebumi is a legal petition issued in CE 988. While the original document no longer survives, this corpus adopts the Shinfukuji Hōshōin manuscript as the base resource and uses its kundoku reading as the corpus text.

The corpus encodes these readings as structured XML, explicitly tagging kunten-related information and scholars’ supplied readings or emendations. In cases of ambiguous readings and orthographic variation, decisions are made based on previous scholarship, while applying normalization necessary for corpus use. We also add morphological annotation following the standards of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics’ Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ), with automatic analyses manually reviewed and corrected. We plan to release it as the sub-corpus “CHJ Wakan Konkōbun”, enabling searches that combine morphology with metadata. We expect this corpus to support comparison with related CHJ materials and to contribute to future research in the history of the Japanese language.

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Paper short abstract

This study re-examines linguistic motivation in Japanese and Hungarian onomatopoeia from a holistic, sound-schema-based perspective. It identifies language-specific sound schemata, the semantic domains they encode, and links the two systems by constructing a Combined sound-schema map.

Paper long abstract

Linguistic motivation and sound symbolism can be approached and researched in multifarious ways. Whether considered a cross-linguistic phenomenon or one specific to a particular language, the linguistically motivated link can be grasped from the level of phonemes or phonesthemes up to the holistic sound patterns of words. Onomatopoeia is informative because its meanings rely on recurring, functionally loaded patterns, but these cannot always be clearly analyzed using classical morphological methods, highlighting the need for a new perspective.

The study aims to re-examine linguistic motivation in Japanese and Hungarian onomatopoeia from a sound-schema-based (word-level) perspective, rather than by correlating meanings with individual sounds or by searching for direct cross-linguistic form–meaning pairs. It investigates (i) which sound schemata characterize Japanese and Hungarian onomatopoeia, (ii) which semantic dimensions these schemata recurrently encode, and (iii) how the two systems can be systematically linked via shared semantic domains.

The approach is grounded in a holistic, dynamic, analogy-based view of linguistic structure (Szilágyi 2013, 2015) and is supported by usage-based evidence for holistic storage and analogical organization in the mental lexicon (MacWhinney 2003).

In a first step we identify the sound schemata (linguistic patterns) characteristic of Japanese and Hungarian onomatopoeia and the semantic domains (functions) these patterns encode. Building on these attributes, we first develop two separate language-specific maps (Map I. – Japanese; Map II. – Hungarian), organized around distinctive sound schemata and their associated meaning domains (e.g., durativity, momentariness) (Research Level I.). These maps provide a methodological framework in which Japanese and Hungarian onomatopoeia can be analyzed within their own systems while also being compared to each other. In a second step, we construct a Combined Map based on the semantic domains represented in the two language-specific maps, designed to align Japanese and Hungarian sound schemata that encode the same meaning domains (Research Level II.). Through this shared semantic-domain-based map, we aim to link the Japanese and Hungarian onomatopoeic lexicons, highlight systematic correspondences between them, and make their similarities explicit.

The study offers insights for teaching Japanese as a foreign language by focusing on native-speaker-sensitive meanings encoded in holistic onomatopoeic patterns.

onomatopoeia, sound-schemata, contrastive linguistic

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the pluralization strategies of loanwords in Japanese Christian sources, focusing on the retention of native plural morphology, the recharacterization through Japanese plural suffixes, and the morphosyntactic conditions that seem to favour or prevent each pluralizing option.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates the pluralizing strategies of loanwords inside the printed texts produced by the Society of Jesus in Japan (kirishitanban stricto sensu). More than 600 loanwords are attested in the Christian sources, many of which retained some aspects of their original morphology, including the expression of gender and number, while also undergoing morphological integration through the addition of Japanese affixes.

Pluralization is a particularly revealing domain, as no less than four competing forms are attested: the types Apostolo (singular), Apostolos (plural), Apostolo-tachi (singular + Japanese plural suffix), and Apostolos-tachi (plural + Japanese plural suffix). In addition, pluralizing prefixes may occasionally occur. These coexisting strategies raise questions about the function and the distribution of number marking in missionary sources.

Thus, after a brief overview of loanwords displaying plural morphology and/or Japanese plural markers, the paper analyses the function associated with the attested forms: particular attention is devoted to the possibility of a singular form (the type Apostolo) to be used as transnumeral, that is, capable of referring to both single and multiple entities. The study then examines the syntactic environments that appear to allow or disfavour specific pluralizing strategies. The data seem to suggest that the presence of alternative number-expressing devices, such as classifiers, tends to disfavour the recharacterization through Japanese plural suffixes, while still allowing plural marking via native morphology (the type Apostolos). Finally, the paper addresses minor but significant discrepancies in the selection of Japanese pluralizing suffix, which are otherwise highly consistent, arguing that such variation reflects the translators’ intentions.

The analysis draws on missionary grammars and on devotional literature printed both in Latin and Japanese characters, with particular attention to texts whose European source is known.

Our findings will align with contemporary scholarship supporting the view that translation was a collaborative process involving European missionaries and Japanese converts, and that certain choices in the translation and printing processes were decided by the Society of Jesus and consistently applied by its members.

Keywords: kirishitanban, Japanese plural markers, Christian loanwords, missionary linguistics

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Paper short abstract

This study examines how vowel duration affects the intelligibility and accentedness of Japanese produced by Polish speakers. Using PSOLA manipulations and native listener evaluations, results show that correcting vowel length significantly improves both intelligibility and accent ratings.

Paper long abstract

This study investigates the role of vowel duration in the phonemic contrast between short and long vowels in Japanese. Nine native Polish speakers produced minimal pairs differing only in vowel length. Using the PSOLA function in Praat, these recordings were manipulated to match native Japanese vowel durations. Both unmanipulated and manipulated stimuli were then used in a perception experiment hosted on the Gorilla Experiment Builder.

Twenty-four native Japanese listeners completed two tasks: an intelligibility task (four-alternative forced-choice) and an accentedness task (7-point Likert scale). The experiment included 120 test trials and 30 filler items from native Japanese speakers.

Initial acoustic analysis revealed that Polish speakers generally produced both short and long vowels with durations exceeding native norms. While most preserved the short-to-long ratio, some speakers exhibited ratios that were either too small or too large.

Statistical analysis using a logistic regression model for the intelligibility task showed that adjusting vowel durations to native-like realizations significantly increased accuracy from 72% in the unmanipulated condition to 89% in the manipulated condition. For accentedness, a linear mixed-effects model revealed that duration manipulation predicted a significant 0.5-point increase on the Likert scale.

These findings suggest that while vowel duration is a primary cue for word recognition, it also serves as a significant marker of nativeness. The study contributes to the literature on L2 speech perception and highlights the necessity of prioritizing temporal accuracy in Japanese pronunciation pedagogy for Polish learners.

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Paper short abstract

The Hachijō language is attested since the Edo period. Since then, several evolutions can be observed, among which a tremendous influence of mainland Japanese on its phonology, grammar and lexicon. This presentation proposes to study this phenomenon as a textbook case of ‘language erosion’ in Japan.

Paper long abstract

Hachijō is a small endangered Japonic variety spoken in the South of the Izu archipelago, roughly 300 km south-est of Tōkyō. It is considered quite remarkably archaic among Japonic languages and was often compared with Eastern Old Japanese (Kaneda:2012). Thus, it is recognised since 2009 as one of Japan's endangered languages by the UNESCO (Moseley, 2009).

Unlike several minority languages of Japan, Hachijō has been attested at least since the late Edo period (Baudel:2024), and was abundantly described and commented ever since. During those roughly 250 years of attestation, several dramatic linguistic evolutions can be observed, among which a tremendous influence of mainland Japanese, on phonology, grammar and lexicon alike.

The concept of ‘language erosion’ or ‘language attrition’ refers to ‘the process whereby a given grammar system undergoes a significant reduction when it is passed from one generation to the next, i.e. incomplete learning of a language system’ (Polinsky, 1995:88), causing ‘a decrease of language proficiency’ between original speakers and ‘language forgetters’, ‘incomplete language learners’ or ‘terminal speakers’.

Thus, this presentation proposes to study this phenomenon in Japan using the example of Hachijō, showing first examples of language erosion within the language, before studying:

- the chronological process of the linguistic erosion of Hachijō between 1800 and today (based upon the statistical analysis of a corpus of Hachijō texts)

- the sociolinguistic causes for its occurring (based upon former studies and testimonies)

- the details of its development (depending on the speaker's gender, social class, topolect or to the context of use), and its specificities within Japan

Finally, the presentation will end with the question of the possibility of reverting language attrition through the process of linguistic revitalisation.

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Paper short abstract

This talk will cover the key findings from the grammar, including how to parse the verb classes into C-final and hybrid and how diachronic shift has led to GNRL vs. INCL opposition among other phenomena in the language. The future of the island, people, and their language will also be discussed.

Paper long abstract

At the southern tip of Japan, 70 kilometers from Taiwan and six kilometers off the shores of Iriomote island lies a small garden of Eden where only the Panari people are allowed to visit. What Bushin Asato on the closing of the lone elementary school in 1975 called “the abandonment of our ancestors”, occurred over the course of 80 years. The population dropped from 500 residents in 1930 to the six officially registered today. The island is now pristine and tourism free and its choral-rock Gusuku walls make it one of the most beautiful places in the Yaeyaman Archipelago. However, following the 'Panari Incident' upon the reports of Sumiya et al. (1974), the people remain highly suspicious of researchers and have maintained a strict no outsiders policy.

Out of great fortune, the author over the last four years, has had the opportunity to slowly befriend and gain the trust of these people culminating in lexicon and a grammar sketch of the language. This talk will cover the key findings from the grammar. These include how to parse the verb classes into C-final and hybrid and how diachronic shift has affected opposition from EXCL vs. INCL to GNRL vs. INCL among other phenomena in the language. The peculiar function of the house-bound plural/polite pronominal suffix will also be investigated. The future of the island, people, and their language will also be discussed in the conclusion with a focus on diachronic change between full hearers and full speakers as all speaker numbers dwindle.

Key Words: Aragusuku-Uechi Yaeyaman, Japonic Languages, Verb Morphology, Clusivity, Language Endangerment, Fieldwork Methodology

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Paper short abstract

In Japanese, first-person desiderative suffixes may exceptionally refer to a non–first-person entity when attached to existential verbs. This paper examines modern and classical desiderative markers and existential verbs to clarify the distribution and underlying causes of the phenomenon.

Paper long abstract

The Modern Japanese desiderative suffix -tai generally implies identity between speaker and agent and requires a first-person subject, a property shared with adjectives of emotion (kanjō keiyōshi) and known as person restriction (ninshō seigen). However, its combination with existential verbs gives rise to a peculiar semantic effect. In such cases, the resulting forms exceptionally permit the target of desire (i.e. the subject of the existential predicate) to be a non–first-person entity.

A concrete illustration of this phenomenon is provided by the combination of -tai with the existential verb aru, yielding the form aritai, which allows a reading in which the desire is directed toward the existence or state of affairs involving a third-person entity. For example, in “jibun no jinsei mo kō aritai” (BCCWJ PM22 00007) "I want my life to be like this too", the desiderative predicate does not express the speaker’s wish to exist, but rather a wish concerning how a third-person entity (“one’s life”) should exist. This phenomenon is not limited to the Modern Japanese suffix -tai, but is also observed with some classical desiderative markers, such as -mafosi and -baya.

The extent to which this relaxation of the person restriction arises is not uniform, and appears to vary depending both on the desiderative marker involved and on the particular existential verb with which it combines. For instance, while some markers tend to retain the original alignment between speaker and agent, -mafosi more consistently allow an agent shift.

The present study examines Modern (-tai) and Classical (-tasi, -mafosi, -baya, -(te/ni)sika) desiderative suffixes attested in combination with existential verbs. Other Old/Classical markers (-na, -koso, -namu), strictly non-desiderative but exhibiting related semantics in combination with existential verbs, will also be taken into account. First, newly collected data are used to clarify the distribution and usage of each suffix–verb combination, also taking diachronic change into consideration for classical lexemes. Finally, the study addresses the broader question of why desiderative morphology interacts differently with existential predicates, and why such interactions vary across individual lexemes. The analysis evaluates to which extent these effects reflect a shared cause, marker-specific semantics, and diachronic developments.

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Paper short abstract

This paper evaluates Ainu language revitalization since Japan’s 1997 Ainu Culture Promotion Act replaced earlier assimilatory legislation. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in Hokkaido, it examines the sociolinguistic state of Ainu today, assessing policy effectiveness and obstacles to revival.

Paper long abstract

In 1997, Japan enacted the Ainu Culture Promotion Act that replaced the assimilationist 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act. This marked a fundamental shift in state policy toward the Ainu people. For nearly thirty years since, the Japanese state has promoted Ainu language as part of broader cultural revitalization. This paper critically examines the effectiveness of this policy approach and assesses the current sociolinguistic state of the Ainu language.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Ainu communities in Hokkaido since 2018 and semi-structured interviews in 2024–2025 with language learners, teachers, and community members, this study identifies both achievements and challenges in Ainu revitalization. State support has enabled language courses, teaching materials, and public awareness initiatives that culminated in the 2019 Ainu Policy Promotion Act and the establishment of Upopoy (National Ainu Museum and Park). Yet the number of fluent speakers has continued to decline, with no first-language speakers left and only few neospeakers among younger generations.

This paper argues that several structural bottlenecks impede meaningful revitalization. First, the policy framework positions Ainu primarily as cultural heritage rather than a living means of communication. Second, institutional support remains concentrated in formal educational settings, with insufficient resources for community-based, immersion-oriented approaches that have proven effective elsewhere. Third, questions of modern use versus preserving traditional language forms and practices create tensions regarding which forms should be taught and preserved. Finally, the absence of the official language status does not support spreading the language to new domains and normalizing its everyday use.

By situating Ainu within broader frameworks of endangered language revitalization, this paper contributes to discussions on the gap between symbolic official recognition and substantive language rights. It asks whether a cultural promotion approach can ever achieve genuine linguistic vitality, or whether more fundamental policy reforms are necessary. The Ainu case offers important lessons for understanding the limitations of state-led revitalization when it operates within frameworks that prioritize heritage preservation over communicative revitalization.

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Paper short abstract

Japanese vocabulary consists of three strata with distinct phonotactics. This study tested whether phonotactics guide kana choice (hiragana vs. katakana) across age groups using low-familiarity and nonce words. Results show strong phonotactic effects with developmental shifts to lexical knowledge.

Paper long abstract

Japanese vocabulary is traditionally divided into three strata—native (wago), Sino-Japanese (kango), and loanwords (gairaigo)—each characterized by distinct phonotactic patterns.Previous research has shown that phonotactic characteristics influence lexical stratum inference, and recent large-scale studies have demonstrated that clusters corresponding to lexical strata can be learned from phonological information alone. Appropriate orthographic choice according to lexical stratum relies on accumulated phonotactic knowledge specific to each stratum from auditory experience. However, the mechanisms by which phonotactic cues are utilized to infer lexical stratum and guide orthographic selection remain unclear. Moreover, little is known about how this mapping process changes across development.

This study investigated whether phonotactics guide kana orthographic choice (hiragana vs. katakana) and how this process differs across age groups. To minimize lexical and orthographic knowledge effects, we employed low-familiarity real words and nonce words. A total of 21 stimuli were used: 10 low-familiarity real words, 2 nonce words, 5 onomatopoeic words, and 4 words with variable orthographic usage. All stimuli were presented auditorily, and participants judged whether each word should be written in hiragana or katakana, with a 15-second response limit. Participants included 21 adults and 96 primary school children.

Results revealed systematic effects of phonotactic patterns on orthographic choice. Stimuli with native-like phonotactics elicited higher hiragana selection rates across all age groups. Conversely, stimuli with loanword-like features (voiced consonants, geminated consonants, long vowels) showed higher katakana selection rates, with particularly strong effects observed for nonce words. Onomatopoeic words and words compatible with multiple lexical strata exhibited more balanced selection patterns. Developmental differences were also observed. Younger children relied more strongly on phonotactic cues, whereas older children showed increased influence of lexical experience and orthographic conventions. For example, hiragana selection for the low-frequency native word /kamachi/ declined substantially from younger to older children.

These findings suggest that phonotactic features serve as robust cues for lexical stratum inference and orthographic selection, even at early developmental stages. Furthermore, the results support a dynamic inferential account in which phonotactic cues initially dominate orthographic choice but are gradually integrated with lexical knowledge and orthographic conventions as linguistic experience accumulates.

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Paper short abstract

This study shows that, despite the absence of length distinction in Polish, Polish speakers can produce closure-duration contrasts in Japanese word-medial plosives, highlighting the role of language-specific phonetic experience in second language cue acquisition.

Paper long abstract

Japanese native speakers rely heavily on closure duration as a key acoustic cue in both the production and perception of word-medial plosive voicing contrasts. In contrast, Polish lacks a phonemic length distinction, and previous studies have shown that Polish speakers experience difficulty acquiring temporally based contrasts, such as pre-fortis clipping in English. This background raises the question of whether Polish speakers are able to acquire and implement the temporal cues required for Japanese word-medial voicing contrasts. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether Polish native speakers can produce categorical closure-duration differences between voiced and voiceless Japanese word-medial plosives, with English and Chinese learners included as reference groups for cross-linguistic comparison.

A controlled recording experiment was conducted with 8 Polish, 10 Japanese, 10 Chinese, and 4 English speakers. Participants produced nine real-word minimal pairs contrasting in word-medial plosive voicing (three pairs for each place of articulation), embedded in a carrier sentence. All non-native participants were advanced learners of Japanese. Acoustic analyses focused on voicing realization and closure duration in order to assess both the presence of categorical contrasts and the magnitude of temporal differences between voiced and voiceless plosives.

The results show that Polish native speakers consistently produced clear between-category voicing distinctions in Japanese word-medial plosives. Importantly, they were also able to realize systematic closure-duration differences for most plosive pairs. The magnitude of these temporal contrasts was comparable to that observed in native Japanese speakers, though smaller than those produced by English speakers. Chinese speakers, by contrast, showed limited evidence of reliable closure-duration differences across most plosive pairs. Additional results from detailed acoustic analyses, including voice onset time and burst-related measures, will also be presented.

Taken together, these findings suggest that Polish speakers can acquire the temporal implementation of Japanese voicing contrasts despite the absence of phonemic length distinctions in their native language. The study highlights the role of language-specific phonetic experience in second-language speech production and provides detailed acoustic evidence for cross-linguistic differences in cue acquisition.

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Paper short abstract

I propose a corpus-linguistic framework grounded in historical grammatical theories to analyze translation choices in my corpus of Rangaku documents. I argue that integrating Early Modern Japanese theories reveals patterns which would otherwise be overlooked by modern linguistic frameworks.

Paper long abstract

The present paper highlights the methodological value of integrating historical theories within modern corpus linguistics, by analyzing Japanese translations from Dutch.

During the Edo period, Japanese scholars were exposed to European languages and compelled to investigate the very nature of translation and to develop new theories and methodologies for the Japanese rendition of terms and concepts previously unknown. They soon realized that translation could not simply consist of a one-to-one substitution of lexical elements. Instead, they increasingly shifted their attention toward word inflection and how meaning emerges from morphosyntactic interactions within sentences.

Since the pioneering research conducted by Shizuki Tadao (Nakano Ryūho, 1760 – 1806), Japanese scholars began systematically analyzing Dutch grammar and developing theories capable of describing previously under-researched morphosyntactic phenomena. The approach to a new foreign linguistic system inevitably led these scholars to examine the grammatical structure of their own native tongue. Handbooks of Dutch grammar produced during this period, which were often also conceived of as translation guides, constitute invaluable sources for understanding how early modern Japanese scholars interpreted grammatical patterns and how they attributed nuances in meaning to them.

Based on these premises, this paper proposes to approach corpus linguistics assuming that historical grammatical theories are indispensable for the examination of the grammatical choices made by the translators within historical corpora. Accordingly, the paper first outlines key principles governing the translation of Dutch grammar into Japanese, as articulated by scholars active in the latter half of the Edo period. It then demonstrates how incorporating these historical theories into corpus analysis enables the identification of grammatical patterns that remain unseen when conducting research solely through the lens of modern grammatical theory. This approach offers productive insights into the long-standing debate surrounding the origin of Japanese passive constructions (Martin 1975; Earns 1993; Kinsui 1997) and their correspondence to traditional European theories on the passive voice. Preliminary research on the data on passivity from my corpus suggests a low degree of correspondence between traditionally defined passive constructions across these translations fro, Dutch. Instead, different patterns emerge thanks to the indications provided by language-related materials of the time.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Old Japanese suffixes -(r)are- and -(r)aye- using corpus data from the Man’yōshū, norito, and senmyō. It argues that their meanings are semantically related to spontaneous intransitive constructions and identifies rare passive-like uses with inanimate subjects.

Paper long abstract

This study investigates the meanings of the suffixes -(r)are- and -(r)aye- in Old Japanese by examining their usage in the Man’yōshū, norito (ritual prayers), and senmyō (imperial edicts), using the Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ) developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. It explores the relationship between the meanings expressed by these constructions and the spontaneous meanings associated with r-row lower bigrade (RS2) and y-row lower bigrade (YS2) intransitive verb constructions.

Previous studies have argued that -(r)are- and -(r)aye-, well known as suffixes expressing passive, non-intentional, and potential meanings, were reanalyzed as grammatical affixes through analogy with the inflectional endings of RS2 and YS2 verbs, respectively (Yanagida 1989). However, the relationship between these grammatical suffixes and intransitive verb constructions has not been examined in detail. This study proposes a hypothesis concerning the morphological extraction of the two suffixes and investigates the semantic relationship between the meanings they encode and those expressed by intransitive constructions.

The analysis shows that, although previous research has claimed that Old Japanese -(r)are- and -(r)aye- lack passive constructions with inanimate subjects (Kawamura 2012), there are a small number of instances that can be interpreted as anticausative uses corresponding to ordinary inanimate-subject passives. It is suggested that such passive-like constructions with inanimate subjects were later marginalized during the Heian period, when narrative prose written in kana flourished and texts increasingly came to be structured from a human-centered perspective, in which other uses of these suffixes became dominant.

Reference

Kawamura, Futoshi (2012) Rarukei-jutsugo-bun-no kenkyū [Studies on -(r)rare- form predicate sentences]. Tokyo, Kuroshio Publishers.

Yanagida, Masashi (1989) Jodōshi “yu/rayu”=to “ru/raru”=to=no kankei. Commemorative Anthology of Japanese Linguistics in Honor of Professor Mitsuo Okumura's Retirement. Tokyo: Ofusha (Reprint in A Historical Phonology of the Japanese Language from the Muromachi Period Onward. 1993, 717-740).

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Paper short abstract

This paper re-evaluates Wenck (1959)’s hypothesis of intervocalic obstruent voicing in Old and Early Middle Japanese through comparison with Old Tuscan evidence, suggesting that voicing may be gradient and non-systematic, resulting from a probabilistically conditioned irregular sound change.

Paper long abstract

To make the well-known lenition pathway /-p-/ > /-w-/, traditionally labelled hagyō tenko, phonologically plausible, Wenck (1959: 81) proposed that /p/ was allophonically voiced word-internally in Old and Early Middle Japanese, and that hagyō tenko proceeded through successive weakening stages [b > *bβ > *β > w > ∅], with segmental loss blocked before /a/. Wenck further suggested that voicing extended to other obstruents in intervocalic position, adducing typological parallels from Korean and Northeastern Japanese dialects. From a sound-change perspective, this proposal offers a convincing basis for the lenition processes affecting the syllables involved in the so-called onbin changes. It has been supported, albeit with differing emphases, by Hayata (1977), Takayama (1992), Frellesvig (1991, 1995, 2010), and Hamano (2000), with partial agreement by Unger (2004). Nevertheless, many Japanese scholars continue to interpret hagyō tenko as a process of fricativisation, typically reconstructed as *p > *ɸ > w (Mabuchi 1971; Shibatani 1990, among others). Vovin (2020) likewise rejects systematic intervocalic voicing, appealing primarily to man’yōgana orthography, which does not consistently reflect such voicing. Beyond the orthography, a blanket voicing hypothesis raises two further issues: (i) it does not explain why lenition seems to be arrested in syllables that did not undergo onbin, and (ii) it entails a later fortition reversal, namely intervocalic devoicing in Late Middle Japanese, that is cross-linguistically uncommon and therefore difficult to justify. This paper reassesses these competing accounts in light of Romance historical phonology. In many Romance varieties, Latin intervocalic obstruents underwent voicing and subsequent lenition, yielding trajectories comparable to Wenck’s chain. Crucially, however, Old Tuscan did not develop an exceptionless intervocalic voicing rule; instead, weakening was selective, gradient, and sensitive to consonant type, prosodic position, and lexical diffusion (Canalis 2014, 2015). Treating intervocalic voicing as probabilistic rather than categorical thus offers a comparative model in which non-automatic, non-systematic outcomes may be expected. Applied to Japanese, this perspective supports a scenario in which voicing and lenition spread differentially across consonant types and environments, allowing the same intervocalic segment to lenite in some words but not others, without positing uniform system-wide voicing or an implausible later fortition change.

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Regarding pronouns in the Hachijo dialect of Japanese, this paper adds new descriptions to previous research and argues that the Hachijo dialect has a contrast between regular plurals and approximate plurals that is not found in Japanese, and that these form a hierarchical structure.

Paper long abstract

The Hachijo dialect is spoken on Hachijo Island in Tokyo, just 55 minutes from Tokyo-Haneda Airport. It is a descendant of the ancient eastern dialect of Japanese, and retains some characteristics of Japanese from a time even older than the earliest written Japanese. It is also designated as an endangered language by UNESCO.

The demonstrative pronoun system of Hachijo has been described in previous studies by Hirayama Teruo (1965) and Kaneda Akihiro (2001), among others. However, issues such as the existence of first-person plural exclusion/inclusion, or whether plural forms can be used when there is essentially one person, have not been discussed. In this presentation, I refined the description of the Hachijo dialect's demonstrative pronoun system, providing a description and analysis that included the discovery of new phenomena.

Previous research has not mentioned the fact that there is no distinction between inclusive and exclusive in first-person plurals, but I will confirm this. I will also show that some usage of second-person pronouns is currently undergoing change (simplification).

Furthermore, we report on the plural suffix "-rara," which has not been mentioned in previous studies. By combining the newly discovered plural suffix "-rara" with the known plural suffix "-ra," we organize and systematize the two series and argue that the Hachijo dialect distinguishes between regular plurals and approximate plurals.

We will also show that there is a hierarchy in the addition of plural suffixes: -rara can be used with people, animals, and interrogative pronouns, but not with the personal names or inanimate objects; -ra was once used for inanimate objects but is no longer used.It also describes ongoing systemic changes in the category.

In this presentation, I clarified that approximative plurals exist in Hachijo dialect with a hierarchical structure through a more detailed description of the pronoun system. By investigating the dialect's language system in more detail and refining the description, I can show that dialect systems, which are thought to be similar to Japanese, have characteristics not found in Japanese. This research will contribute to the high-quality preservation of Hachijo, an endangered language, and to cross-linguistic analysis.

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The Roman Jesuit Archives hold 17th-century manuscripts written in Macau, containing Chinese characters with translations in Latin, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Focusing on Japanese kanji readings therein, I will examine the Japanese kanji studies by Jesuits after being expelled from Japan.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines the study of Japanese kanji by Jesuits in 17th-century Macau.

The earliest European analyses of kanji pronunciation date back to Christian documents (Kirishitan Shiryō) compiled between the late 16th and early 17th centuries. While sources such as "Vocabulário da Língua do Japão" (Nagasaki, 1603–04), "Arte da Lingoa de Iapam" (Nagasaki, 1604–08), and "Arte Breue da Lingoa Iapoa" (Macau, 1620) are well-known, little-known　manuscripts related to the Japanese language produced in Macau also exist.

The Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI) houses manuscripts containing Chinese characters with translations or transcriptions in Latin, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese. One of these manuscripts includes Japanese kanji pronunciations (e.g., 的 nô, 爾 vô) that appear irregular compared to standard readings. While some of these irregular pronunciations closely resemble the Tō-on (Early Modern Sino-Japanese reading) of the Edo period, others cannot be explained by this alone. Some may be simple errors, while certain cases appear to reflect the influence of kundoku—the traditional Japanese method of reading Chinese texts. The pronunciations influenced by kundoku appear curious when considered as readings of the kanji alone.

The Japanese language recorded in these manuscripts written in Macau serves as a valuable resource for understanding how Europeans studied the Japanese language outside of Japan. These findings are expected to contribute significantly to the fields of historical Japanese linguistics and Jesuit linguistic studies.

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This study examines emerging Japanese ethnolects among South American, South and Southeast Asian residents in Japan. Based on interview and baseline data, it analyzes syntactic variation, which shows reduced case marking, preference for simple sentences and suggests emerging Japanese ethnolects.

Paper long abstract

The number of non-Japanese residents in Japan has recently reached approximately 4.0 million. Since the late 1980s, Japanese government policies have facilitated the migration of descendants of Japanese emigrants (Nikkei), particularly from Brazil and Peru, through labor visa programs. Alongside earlier migrant groups (e.g., Koreans and Chinese) and more recent groups (e.g., Vietnamese and Filipinos), many of these migrants have now lived in Japan for over three decades, working as permanent or contract laborers, skilled workers, or interpreters. While some continue to move between Japan and their countries of origin, others have settled permanently, purchasing homes and securing long-term employment.

This study examines ways of speaking Japanese among non-Japanese residents in Japan. Since 2023, a new project has aimed to deepen our understanding of the social contexts of language contact in these communities. Extended fieldwork in Kanto Nagoya and its surrounding regions has involved semi-structured interviews conducted in both Japanese and participants’ heritage languages, as well as recordings of family conversations in collaboration with community members. The focus is on South American, South Asian, and Southeast Asian migrants who were either born and raised in Japan without visiting their ancestral homelands or who immigrated to Japan later in life.

Drawing on 85 semi-structured interviews with 86 speakers (40 Brazilians, 33 Peruvians, 9 South Asians, and 4 Southeast Asians) conducted by December 2025, this study explores participants’ language biographies, including migration histories and reflections on growing up in Japan. The analysis focuses on syntactic variation in Japanese, using 49.5 hours of baseline sociolinguistic interview data collected in Aikawa, Kanagawa. The results indicate that (1) case markers are more frequently omitted, (2) simple sentences are preferred over compound and complex sentences, and (3) noun phrase structures tend to be shorter. Based on these combined syntactic features, the paper discusses the possibility of an emerging ethnolectal variety of Japanese.

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Through discourse and quantitative analyses of the Tamahiyo baby-naming guides, I show a shift from a familiar voice emphasizing connections with readers to one emphasizing expert authority. Now also featuring fewer unique names, this shift may impact Tamahiyo’s influence on future naming trends.

Paper long abstract

This study examines how linguistic strategies and name recommendations in the Tamahiyo baby-naming guides reflect shifts in their authoritative status. First published in 2003, the Tamahiyo guide was an innovative newcomer, contributing to the popularity of unique names (Kobayashi, 2009). Today, the Tamahiyo brand has become a ubiquitous presence, with annual updates (Unser-Schutz, 2025). Because such guides must convince readers to follow their advice, Tamahiyo’s changing authoritative status affects what linguistic strategies they use and the names they recommend, especially considering public criticism of unique names and legal constraints on name readings introduced in 2025.

The study compares the original 2003 guide and the 2026-2027 edition, using a discourse analysis of the text and a quantitative analysis of their matched graphic/phonetic names lists. While much is unchanged between editions, with a variety of speech acts of different directness levels typical of Japanese advice (Tanaka, 2015), the newest edition uses a less familiar and intimate voice. Some hedges (e.g., yō ‘seems’), sentence final particles (100 over 515 pages (2003) vs. 59 over 485 pages (2026-2027)) and community-building terms (e.g., sempai mama ‘senior moms’) have decreased in frequency, with the newer edition instead frequently referencing external sources of authority (e.g., dictionaries, laws).

These changes are reflected in the names list. The 2026-2027 edition lists ~32% fewer matched graphic/phonetic forms (8,596 vs. 12,661). Fewer unique phonetic forms are listed (1,578 vs. 5,170), with fewer graphic variants per form (2.45 vs. 5.45). Although both editions emphasize choosing names that are not ordinary, this more limited list suggests that Tamahiyo’s shift in authoritative voice has been accompanied by a conservative shift in its recommendations. With the data suggesting that Tamahiyo increasingly prioritizes authority through expert knowledge over intimate connections, I also consider how these changes may affect Tamahiyo’s influence on future naming trends.

Kobayashi, Y. (2009). Nazuke no sesōshi ‘koseiteki na namae’ o fīrudowāku. Fukyosha.

Tanaka, L. (2015). Advice in Japanese radio phone-in counselling. Pragmatics, 25(2), 251–285.

Unser-Schutz, G. (2025). The role of baby-naming guides in the presentation of gender in names: A case study of the Tamahiyo baby naming guides. Sociolinguistic Studies, 19(1–2), 107–127.

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This study will address the current linguistic debate on the relevance of the syllable as a universal unit. It will focus on the following research question: Can the phonology of Ryukyu languages be examined according to a syllabic or moraic model?

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This study will attempt to address the current linguistic debate on the relevance of the syllable as a universal unit. It will focus on the following research question: Can the phonology of Ryukyu languages be examined according to a syllabic or moraic model?

On the theoretical level, this research will attempt to question the relevance of frames of reference and concepts from the Western linguistic tradition in the study of Japonic languages. The universal role of the syllable will be challenged by the study of the linguistic perspective endogenous to Japan (Labrune 2024: 40–42), whose native linguistic tradition attributes the role of the only relevant prosodic unit to the mora (Labrune 2012: 115).

This research reflects on the theory of the prosodic hierarchy proposed by McCarthy and Prince (1994: 320), which observes three levels between the prosodic word and the phoneme (foot, syllable, mora), and the resulting strict layer hypothesis (Nespor and Vogel 1986), which postulates a subordinate stratification between each level and the necessity of including all prosodic units in the phonological analysis of a target language. Drawing from the unresolved debate concerning the necessity of the syllable in the prosodic analysis of Japanese, this study aims at exploring whether, in the Ryukyu languages, the syllable and the mora maintain a subordinate relationship, an isomorphic relationship, or whether the mora represents a sufficient unit of analysis (cf. Macaulay 2024: 160–161). Therefore, this study aims at assessing the role of the mora and the syllable within the phonological analysis of Ryukyu languages and whether their coexistence is essential and justified.

On the empirical level, fieldwork among native speakers of Ryukyu languages will be conducted in order to confirm the presence of prosodic features, segment distribution rules and phonological or morphological rules that include or require a syllabic model (Pellard 2009: 72). By highlighting their internal diversity and typological interest, this study also intends to contribute to the documentation of Ryukyu languages, with the aim of supporting the preservation of the linguistic and cultural heritage of the Ryukyu Islands.

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The paper examines comparative correlative constructions in Japanese and Korean from a typological perspective, comparing them with other Asian languages. It analyzes their morphosyntactic strategies, diachronic development, and possible effects of language contact.

Paper long abstract

Keywords: comparative correlative; Asian languages; language contact; morphosyntax; linguistic typology

This paper focuses on the strategies employed by Japanese and Korean in the so-called comparative correlative constructions and their diachronic development. This analysis is informed by preceding typological research. Comparative correlative constructions express situations where a change in degree in one phenomenon leads to a change in another. In English these are expressed using the ‘the…the’ construction, as in ‘the more the merrier’, ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall’, etc. Different languages code these constructions in different ways, even though there are frequent similarities in the structure on the syntactic level (den Dikken, 2005).

East (and Central) Asian languages exhibit a wide variety of strategies of marking such constructions which will be briefly discussed and compared in this paper. These do often differ from patterns seen in most Indo-European languages, where the first clause starts with a relative pronoun, and the second with a demonstrative pronoun as in the Czech ‘Čím víc gólů dáme, tím víc bodů máme.’ This variability makes them interesting also from the typological point of view. Some Asian languages use rather straightforward strategies using double particles of degree, such as Manchu/Sibe, or Chinese, as in (1). Some outliers, such as Ewenki, employ comparative suffixes.

(1) Eli yawe-m(e) eli saxurum

PTC go-CVB PTC cold

‘It gets colder the further we go.’ (Sibe)

Others, such as Japanese, employ a rather more unusual construction where the verb/adjective first appears in a conditional converbal form, and then the same verb/adjective appears again in an adnominal form (in Japanese identical to the finite verb form) modifying a particle of degree (2). This can be followed by a different adjective or a whole clause. A surprisingly similar construction can be observed in Korean.

(2) Tabere-ba tabe-ru hodo oishii.

Eat-COND eat-NPST measure tasty

‘The more you eat the tastier it gets.’ (Japanese)

However, neither Japanese nor Korean appear to have used this type of construction consistently throughout their diachronic development. Extant data from different stages of these languages will be analyzed, and the possible influence of language contact will be discussed.

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Through the analysis of actual talk, focusing on the design, sequential placement, and functions of direct speech constructions in Japanese conversational interactions, the paper explains what makes their use such a popular and powerful resource for affective stance display in Japanese.

Paper long abstract

In the course of informal conversational interactions, Japanese speakers readily transition into direct speech and back, using a range of direct speech constructions that allow them to enact not only their own and other people’s past utterances, but also imagined speech, thoughts, emotions, and attitudes attributed to the self as well as others. By using direct speech, speakers ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ their co-participants what happened, might (have) happen(ed), happens, is happening, or what they think will happen, while simultaneously position their co-participants as an interpreting audience to the enactments, tasked with picking up on the affective stances that the speakers thereby display, making use of all semiotic resources.

In this paper, we will consider the speakers’ use of direct speech constructions in the process of recounting past events. Using extracts from actual conversational interactions, we will examine the formats that direct speech constructions in Japanese conversational interactions may take as well as their sequential placement, actions they are used to perform, and effects they have on the ongoing interaction. Through the analysis, we will uncover and describe the major characteristics that make direct speech constructions such a useful and popular resource for affective stance display in Japanese.

The theoretical and methodological framework this study adopts is anchored in Interactional Linguistics. The paper is based on the analysis of the author’s own collection of recordings of spontaneous face-to-face conversational interactions between Japanese young adult friends, various everyday conversations from the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversations (CEJS), and telephone conversations from the TalkBank Japanese CallFriend and CallHome corpora.

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This paper examines the Yuhap tradition in Japan and Chosŏn Korea, asking how "correct" kanji/hanja forms were selected in literacy primers outside China. Comparing comparable primers, it shows Japan and Korea developed unique character-form choices rather than replicating a single Chinese standard.

Paper long abstract

This paper studies the Yuhap textual tradition in Japan and Chosŏn Korea. It asks how "correct" kanji/hanja forms were selected and stabilized in literacy primers outside China. The core source is the Chosŏn-printed Sinjeung Yuhap (1574), an expanded Yuhap. For Japan, I use Ruigō-related witnesses for comparison, including Kaibara Ekiken's Senji Ruigō (1692).

I focus on editorial decisions: the character forms preferred in each witness. I select a controlled sample of characters that show clear graphic variation. I classify the differences into four types: component substitution, stroke modification, structural adjustment, and adoption of variant forms.

I then read these patterns together with "norm signals" on the page, such as prefaces and usage notes. I also compare the selected forms with reference traditions: Chinese character dictionaries, Japanese and Korean dictionaries, and calligraphic exemplars.

Because kanji/hanja originated in China, discussions of "standard characters" often presuppose that a China-based standard simply diffused outward. This paper takes a different approach. It traces how character forms were selected, fixed, or revised across editions of the Yuhap tradition in Japan and Chosŏn Korea. Even within a shared framework, form choices diverged in consistent ways. I relate these divergences to target learners, local criteria for "proper" forms, and editors' scholarly backgrounds.

By comparing these differences to the dictionaries and calligraphic exemplars, the paper shows that "standard" character-form judgments in Japan and Korea were not identical. These differences can be traced in specific primers and edition practices around the seventeenth century.

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This study investigates how L2 Japanese learners manage epistemic authority, using L1 and L2 English as comparative baselines. It explores whether they orient toward relative epistemic rights, language-specific conventions, or communication habits from L1.

Paper long abstract

Research in interactional sociolinguistics suggests that social norms affect how speakers chose to exhibit knowledge or expertise (Kamio, 1994, 1997; Stivers et al., 2011). Conversation participants track ‘epistemic authority’ (the socially sanctioned right to claim knowledge) because knowledge impacts the social standing of everyone involved (Heritage & Raymond, 2005). While this authority is often explicitly signaled through linguistic markers, it is also ‘granted’ by virtue of deference to social roles or social categories based on seniority or specialized experience.

In our previous research on L2 Japanese, indeed we found that stance-marking can be variously felicitous depending on whether participants’ mutual epistemic positions are appropriately calibrated. We proposed that social friction could arise not from a speaker asserting their own knowledge, but from displaying that knowledge inappropriately relative to others. Even when a speaker has subjective authority (or a legitimate claim to information), unmitigated display of knowledge may suggest 'intersubjective epistemic primacy' (or a higher degree of knowledge) over the other conversation participants. Since L2 speakers often find themselves in a socially asymmetrical position when discussing matters pertaining to the target language or culture with L1 speakers – by definition endowed with more extensive expertise – if they fail to signal their relative knowledge position, L2 users can unintentionally come across as categorical or patronizing during discussions.

Based on these observations, we set out to examine learners’ management of epistemic authority through their use of modal markers (including to omou; I think, tabun; maybe), and other discourse markers, by comparing English speakers’ L2 Japanese with Japanese speakers’ L2 English in interactions with interlocutors of varying status (L1 vs L2 users, teachers vs peers). The present study aims to fill a double research gap: while epistemic stance-taking has been examined in pedagogic tasks in L2 English (e.g. Jakonen & Morton, 2015; Kääntä, 2014, among others) equivalent data for L2 Japanese learners is missing. Moreover, research currently lacks cross-linguistic studies that evaluate whether the marking of a speaker's epistemic stance is shaped by participants’ orientation to relative epistemic rights, language-specific conventions, or the transfer of communication conventions from L1.

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Slovenian has largely lost phonemic vowel length and use duration suprasegmentally to mark stress. Slovenian learners of Japanese master long–short contrasts but systematically reinterpret certain trimoraic CV–CV–R words as CV–R–CV, demonstrating prosodic transfer affecting L2 segmental structure.

Paper long abstract

In most Slovene dialects, vowel length no longer functions as a phonemic feature at the segmental level. The historical long–short contrast has been lost, and vowel duration is instead used at the suprasegmental level to cue stress placement and accentual prominence.

In contrast, Japanese encodes vowel length phonemically, and minimal pairs such as 通る tōru ‘pass by’ and 取る toru ‘take’ illustrate that vowel duration is contrastive at the moraic level and independent of stress or accent placement. Slovenian learners of Japanese generally acquire this contrast successfully and produce phonemic vowel length accurately in most lexical contexts.

However, a systematic deviation has been observed at the beginner level in the production of certain disyllabic, trimoraic Japanese words containing a sequence of identical vowels in the second syllable (CV–CV–R). Based on both controlled and spontaneous speech data, these forms are occasionally realized as CV–R–CV, yielding outputs that preserve the overall mora count but alter the mora–segment association. Crucially, this reordering occurs only under specific prosodic conditions, namely when the initial mora lacks lexical pitch accent. Thus, the target form 旅行 ryokō ‘a trip’ may surface as [rjoːko], rendering it homophonous with the female given name Ryōko.

This pattern suggests a reanalysis of L2 Japanese vowel length as a suprasegmental rather than a segmental property. The study systematically examines the influence of Slovene accentual representations on this non-target-like pronunciation and argues that learners reinterpret the long vowel not as a bimoraic vowel linked to a single syllabic nucleus, but as a prosodic lengthening effect associated with the most prominent unit in the word. This reinterpretation reflects transfer from the Slovene prosodic system, in which durational cues are systematically tied to stress rather than lexically specified at the segmental level.

The findings demonstrate that suprasegmental interference may give rise to non-target-like segmental outputs, even in cases where learners appear to have acquired the relevant contrast. Pedagogically, these findings underscore the need to explicitly represent moraic structure in teaching Japanese pronunciation to Slovene learners.

Keywords: vowel length, moraic structure, suprasegmental transfer, L2 phonological acquisition, Slovene–Japanese prosodic interference

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Analysing both original texts and possible translations, my paper discusses the necessity to translate more Japanese multilingual and translingual literary works proposing a methodology based on foundational concepts within translation theory to approach such texts as inherently translational.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I draw upon my ongoing experience translating Levy Hideo’s work Ten’anmon (1996) and my research findings to discuss why it is necessary to translate more Japanese multilingual texts and to propose a specific methodology based on foundational concepts within Translation Theory, specifically Nida’s principles of formal and functional equivalence and Venuti’s foreignization strategy to achieve such result.

According to my analysis, Japanese multilingual literary texts often include what I call a “hidden translator,” a presence, often disguised as the main character or the narrator, who simultaneously enhances the text’s accessibility for monolingual readers and reflects the author’s emotional engagement with different languages. Such stylistic device marks the original texts as inherently translational with this aspect typically manifesting in two ways which I refer to as Cosmetic Monolingualism and Functional Multilingualism.

Cosmetic Monolingualism allows the text to hint at its multilingual nature without showing it directly, instead relying on translation that happens off the page, Functional Multilingualism openly shows several languages within the text but still caters to readers familiar with only one language through techniques such as using furigana as translations, repeating phrases in multiple languages, or offering sufficient context so readers’ understanding remains unaffected. Consequently, it is essential to approach multilingual texts through the lens of Translation in order to consider the role of multiple languages and scripts in the source text, before proceeding to translate it aiming to faithfully conveying the narrator’s emotional connection to each language.

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The common translation of bunmei kaika as “civilization and enlightenment” is often questioned, always presupposing a synonymy of bunmei and “civilization” already as given. This presentation questions this equation to trace its origins (as well as early uses of kaika) in contemporary sources.

Paper long abstract

The Sino-Japanese character compound bunmei is commonly considered a “translation word” for the nineteenth-century English “civilization,” adapted from classical Chinese precedents during the transition from the Tokugawa to the Meiji period. Based on contemporary materials, this presentation demonstrates that this was not how the term bunmei was used and understood at first. Bunmei initially gained currency as a translation word for “enlightened” as in “enlightened government,” even as it was apt to convey a sense of the eighteenth-century English “civility” as well. Depending on context, it also worked as a translation word for the English “civilized” for this reason. But bunmei had never been used to explicitly render the nineteenth-century English “civilization” before 1875. For obvious reasons, the English “civilization” had been rendered as bunka if not kaika (or bunmei kaika for that matter) up to that point.

Fukuzawa Yukichi’s insistence on “civilization” (rather than “civility and enlightenment”) as the proper meaning of “Western bunmei” requires closer scrutiny than it has hitherto received. The same holds true for his derivation of the English term “civilization” from the Latin civitas as opposed to the Latin civilis/civilitas, and for the lexical background of the term kaika by which early uses of this term would still have been informed.

Fukuzawa’s linguistic moves in this case are indicative of a structural transformation in early Meiji political thought at the same time as they are emblematic for the function of so-called “translation words” in modern Japanese more generally.

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The paper analyses how the first travel stories about Japan were mediating Japanese words and phrases in the 19th c Estonian newspapers written by the Estonian seamen. The sample consists of three narratives between 1867-1900 and the language examples are divided according to their type and context.

Paper long abstract

The first travel writings about Japan were published in the Estonian language newspapers during the second half of the 19th century. At the time the Estonian seamen were the only mediators of personal and first-hand accounts of foreign countries in Estonian printed word to the readers.

The paper analyses the Japanese words and phrases used in the narratives by the sample of three travel stories: 1) from 1867-1869 by Jüri Jürison in the newspaper “Eesti Postimees”; 2) from 1888-1889 by the seaman from the warship Dmitry Donskoy in the newspaper “Virmaline” and 3) from 1896 and 1900 by Mihkel Michelson in the newspaper “Olewik”.

The Japanese language examples are divided and examined according to the different word types and phrases according to the usage contexts. For example, nouns (e.g. musume, samurai) and interjections (e.g. ohayō, sayonara) or phrases of everyday life (e.g. eppi yokka) or historical topics (e.g. katakiuchi). One of the central research questions is why the Japanese words were conveyed to the Estonian readers and what were they aimed to communicate.