Benefits of Being Atypical: From the Perspective of Japanese Language

Catalog description

This course explores an alternative approach to the study of language and communication, starting from an examination of facts observed in the structure and use of Japanese. As Japanese is structurally distinct from many languages on which the dominant "universal" principles have been formed, and as its pragmatic and sociocultural contexts are also dissimilar, linguistic facts in Japanese have generally been considered "atypical" or "peripheral" in traditional theoretical accounts, often resulting in their exclusion from major theoretical discussions or from "core" linguistic phenomena. However, atypical and typical phenomena are both part of human verbal and social behavior, and the distinction between them is often more ideological than factual. Through examination of a variety of structural issues (e.g. silent refence, noun-modification, honorifics), pragmatic topics (e.g. Gricean principles, speech acts), extending to discourse involving gender, sexuality, age and cognitive conditions, the course discusses whether investigating "atypical" phenomena illuminates broader principles that yield insights into the "typical" and "core" phenomena of language.