The Research Centre for Japanese Language and Linguistics was created in March 2009 within the Faculty of Oriental Studies to function as an umbrella for research activities related to Japanese language and linguistics through the University.

The Centre also serves as a forum for publicizing teaching, seminars, lectures, and other activities of interest to Japanese linguistics, and as a point of access to information for prospective graduate students interested in Japanese language and linguistics. The Centre welcomes academic visitors to the University who work within Japanese linguistics.

In addition to the Centre's membership of staff and graduate students from the Faculty of Oriental Studies and the new Faculty of Linguistics and our visiting scholars, the Centre also has a membership of external affiliates who have a connection with the Centre and its members, for example through joint research projects.

A major research project hosted within the Centre is the four-and-a-half year project, 'Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese', which is a collaborative effort involving researchers working in England, Japan, and the US. However, the research of the members of the Centre is wide-ranging, from acquisition of Japanese as a foreign language to reconstruction of proto-Japanese morphology.

Recent Talks

19-20 February 2013
Bjarke Frellesvig presented "A diachronic perspective on early Japanese adjectival morphology: Some more pre-Old Japanese copulas" at the at the EALS. (more)

1 March 2013
Bjarke Frellesvig, Stephen Wright Horn, and Kerri L Russell presented "The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese" at the HiCor Workshop. (more)

26 February 2013
Peter Sells (University of York) presented "Elliptical Constructions in Korean" at the EALS. (more)

New Publications

Kerri L Russell and Stephen Wright Horn. 2012. "Verb Semantics and Argument Realization in Pre-modern Japanese: A Corpus Based Study." Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal, 25, 129-148.

The Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese is now available online. This full poetic corpus of Old Japanese presents the original script and a phonemic transcription of all Old Japanese poetic texts.

New Book

コーヒーブレイク
Join us for our weekly coffee and Japanese linguistics on Fridays at 11 during full term.

The East Asian Linguistics Seminar takes place in the Oriental Institute on Tuesdays from 5-6 during Hilary Term. (schedule)

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