Author's response: Mundari and argumentation in word-class analysis

1. Introduction: Our three commentators raise such a host of deep and interesting issues that we cannot hope to answer them all within the time and space at our disposal. To begin with, we would like to thank them for pushing us to articulate the reason

Mundari: The myth of a language without word classes

Mundari, an Austroasiatic language of India (Munda family), has often been cited as an example of a language without word classes, where a single word can function as noun, verb, adjective, etc. according to the context. These claims, originating in a 1903 grammar by the missionary John Hoffmann, have recently been repeated uncritically by a number of typologists. In this article we review the evidence for word class fluidity, on the basis of a careful analysis of Hoffmann's corpus as well as substantial new data, including a large lexical sample at two levels of detail. We argue that in fact Mundari does have clearly definable word classes, with distinct open classes of verb and noun, in addition to a closed adjective class, though there are productive possibilities for using all as predicates. Along the way, we elaborate a series of criteria that would need to be met before any language could seriously be claimed to lack a noun-verb distinction: most importantly strict compositionality, bidirectional flexibility, and exhaustiveness through the lexicon

Changing the Name of the Society of Japanese Linguistics : From Kokugo Gakkai to Nihongo Gakkai

Globalization, Localization, and Japanese Studies in the Asia-Pacific Region : Past, Present, Future, シドニー大学, 2003年11月10日-13

インド東部チョターナーグプル地方における言語輻合について

「内陸アジア言語の研究」第6号 (Studies on the Inner Asian Languages

「再構」再考 : 日本言語学史の一断面

国立国語研究所 研究系 言語変異研究領域 客員教授Invited Professor, Language Variation Division, Research Department, NINJAL比較言語学の用語である Reconstruction の訳語は，「再構」とも「再建」とも使用されている。服部四郎は1950年代半ばから亡くなるまで「再構」を使ってきたが，2018年に出版された『日本祖語の再建』では「再建」となっている。その補注をおこなった上野善道は「再構」が服部によって導入された訳語との認識を示したが，小論ではそれを検証した。その結果，「再構」の初出はソシュールの翻訳『言語学原論』（1928）で小林英夫が使用したもので，ほぼ同時期に，泉井久之助，新村出など，京都大学出身者によって使用されるようになった。一方，「再建」は新村がイェスペルセンを訳出した1901年が初出であった。また，「再造」「再現出」などの訳語もみられた。The term "reconstruction" in historical linguistics has been translated into Japanese in two ways:SAIKEN and SAIKŌ. Shirō Hattori mainly used SAIKŌ for "reconstruction," which Zendō Uwano considered to have been coined by Hattori. However, the title of his posthumous publication is SAIKEN. Thus, I reexamined the use of this term in the history of linguistics in Japan, finding that Hideo Kobayashi, who translated the famed Cours de linguistique générale by Saussure into Japanese, was the first to use the term SAIKŌ, and then Hisanosuke Izui and Izuru Shinmura of Kyoto University adopted this term in 1930

Seismic exploration at Fuji volcano with active sources : The outline of the experiment and the arrival time data

Fuji volcano (altitude 3,776m) is the largest basaltic stratovolcano in Japan. In late August and early September 2003, seismic exploration was conducted around Fuji volcano by the detonation of 500 kg charges of dynamite to investigate the seismic structure of that area. Seismographs with an eigenfrequency of 2 Hz were used for observation, positioned along a WSW-ENE line passing through the summit of the mountain. A total of 469 seismic stations were installed at intervals of 250-500 m. The data were stored in memory on-site using data loggers. The sampling interval was 4 ms. Charges were detonated at 5 points, one at each end of the observation line and 3 along its length. The first arrival times and the later-phase arrival times at each station for each detonation were recorded as data. P-wave velocities in the surface layer were estimated from the travel time curves near the explosion points, with results of 2.5 km/s obtained for the vicinity of Fuji volcano and 4.0 km5/s elsewhere