Modality and the Japanese Language (review)

Modality and the Japanese Language (review) Heiko Narrog Language, Volume 81, Number 4, December 2005, pp. 1008-1009 (Review) Published by Linguistic Society of America DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2005.0182 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/191105 [ Access provided at 4 Oct 2020 03:02 GMT from Stony Brook University (SUNY) ] 1008 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 81, NUMBER 4 (2005) not yet received sufficient attention from linguists. One of these is the relationship between borrowing and grammaticalization in contact situations, especially those connected with pidgins and creoles. H& T stress the importance of heterogeneous approaches for understanding language change, suggesting a coordination of historical linguistics with research in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and corpus studies. Areas said to be in need of further examination include patterns of grammaticalization across styles and genres, and the roles of language planning, literacy, and psychological factors in grammaticalization. This textbook is not only a useful tool for students wishing to familiarize themselves with grammaticalization theory, but also a valuable resource that provides researchers with much needed information about the contemporary status of this theory together with extensive up-to-date references. [OLGA THOMASON, University of Georgia.] Now I know only so far: Essays in ethnopoetics. By DELL HYMES. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 512. ISBN 0803273355. $29.95. This collection of Hymes’s articles is an excellent example of a work that crosses boundaries and draws on four scholarly fields, resulting in what is referred to as ethnopoetics. In the author’s words, ‘This book . . . grows out of my own intellectual ancestry, a mingling of anthropology, folklore, linguistics, and literature’ (vii). The book consists of sixteen chapters, four of which were first published in the 1980s, nine in the 1990s, and three more recently. This is the second collection of ethnopoetic essays by H; the first, ‘In vain I tried to tell you’: Essays in Native American ethnopoetics, was published in 1981 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). In his introduction to the present work H acknowledges that over the years he has come to more fully understand traditional narratives, Native American ones in particular, but he also points out how much more is still to be learned. This admission is reflected in the title of the book, which is taken from the sentence with which Victoria Howard occasionally concluded her traditional Clackamas tales—told to Melville Jacobs back in 1929 and 1930—‘Now I know only this far’ (xi). The author’s acquaintance with the many sources from which he has drawn his material for analysis or commentaries is impressive. He refers to languages of no less than fourteen Native (North) American language families, and in addition to data from his own fieldwork makes use of materials recorded in both Native American languages and translations, some from as early as 1891 (by Franz Boas). In his analyses or commentaries on the works of others H goes into such detail that here even a highly abbreviated account of his approach is out of the question. However, it is possible to summarize some of the main points: Myths and other traditional narratives are ways in which members of a society make sense of the world; it appears that narratives of (probably) all communities have definite recurrent patterns, usually (not always) clearly marked; more specifically, these patterns are represented by lines (in some languages each predicate phrase is a line); lines are in patterned relations to one another; these relations allow variation that may take the form of elaboration and intensification; patterns may be identified even in traditional narratives collected in English, but unabbreviated field records in the original language are preferable (a good phonetic transcription would suffice). Because the essays of this collection span almost two decades and have originally appeared in a variety of sources, some duplication has been inevitable. The products of H’s fertile mind may remind the reader of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s transformational relationships, but H’s procedures are more easily replicable. As the starting point of ethnopoetic analysis, H advocates ‘practical’ structuralism, referring to ‘the elementary task of discovering the relevant features and relationships of a language and its texts’ (123). The essays are supplemented by copious notes (441–71) and a bibliography (473–94). [ZDENEK SALZMANN, Northern Arizona University.] Modality and the Japanese language. By YUKI JOHNSON. (Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies 44.) Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2003. Pp. xiii, 282. ISBN 1929280181. $75 (Hb). Although there is comparatively little writing on Japanese modality in the general linguistics literature, the topic has been extremely popular within Japan, particularly in the past fifteen years. The approach to modality in these ‘domestic’ studies, however, offers little diversity. The dominant concept of modality in Japan is an amalgam of, on the one hand, the notion of modality as the psychological attitude of the speaker (an idea going back to Otto Jespersen and John Lyons), and, on the other, the nineteenthcentury notion of modality as the relationship between subject and predicate. The latter was distilled in Japan into the concept of chinjutsuron (predication theory) by the likes of Yoshio Yamada and Motoki Tokieda. This new study in English by Yuki Johnson, a scholar based in the US, aims to give a fresh view on the topic. BOOK NOTICES Framed by an introductory chapter (Ch. 1) and a conclusion (Ch. 6), Chs. 2 and 3 offer J’s new framework for the study of Japanese modality, while the other two chapters deal with Japanese aspect (Ch. 4) and conditionals (Ch. 5), respectively, and are only loosely related to the main topic of the book. In Ch. 2, J outlines the recent history of the study of modality in the West and in Japan. She then proposes a new approach to Japanese modality which is, simply put, the application of the mainstream approach to English modality to Japanese. This mainstream approach is characterized by the notions of deontic vs. epistemic modality and possibility vs. necessity. As it turns out, however, J hasn’t discarded the notion of the speaker’s psychological attitude (117). Ch. 3 opens with a questionable twist as J opts to recognize as modal only those markers that follow the tense morpheme of the verb. At this point some in-depth argumentation would have been appropriate since this is a decision with potentially far-reaching consequences. The claim that tense is ‘commonly accepted’ as the divider between modal and nonmodal (34, cf. also 27–28) in Japanese linguistics is debatable to say the least (Takashi Masuoka, for instance, draws the dividing line at nominalization). The modal markers that have been identified with respect to the above-named semantic and syntactic properties are then scrutinized with the help of several tests and sentence frames in order to determine the characteristics of each marker. One of the major conclusions of the chapter is presented in a figure which compares the ‘degree of modality’ of the epistemic markers (105). The results shown in the figure will come as a surprise to many who are familiar with the Japanese studies on modality and bear witness to the uniqueness of J’s approach. Ch. 4 discusses the relationship between aspect (mainly the Japanese progressive/resultative marker -te iru) and volitional control on one hand, and aspect and negation on the other. J shows that stativity is related to lack of volitional control by the speaker, and negation, contrary to previous assumptions, does not necessarily result in stativity. In Ch. 5, J teases apart the functions of three common conditional markers in Japanese, -(r)eba, -tara, and -to. With respect to its descriptive coverage, this volume is perhaps surpassed by numerous Japanese publications. The real value of this book, however, lies in the fact that it offers an alternative to the dominant mainstream approach to modality in Japan and ironically does so by applying an approach that is mainstream elsewhere. Readers familiar with the discussion in Japan will be delighted by the many original ideas and insights. Thus, this book is a very welcome contribution to the field. [HEIKO NARROG, Tohoku University, Japan.] 1009 Syntactic heads and word formation. By MARIT JULIEN. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 407. ISBN 0195149513. $47.50. The book’s proposal is conceptually straightforward: syntax manipulates heads, not words, and morphology forms morphemes, not words. Words are not the product of grammar but are perceived as units due to consistent adjacency and cooccurrence of the two or more morphemes they are made from. Focusing on verbal morphology, Julien argues that ordering among morphemes can indeed be tightly connected—although not completely reduced—to syntax. As she assumes Richard Kayne’s linear correspondence axiom, all languages are consequently underlyingly head-initial, all suffixes are the result of head-movement to their left, and all prefixes are just elements remaining unmoved in their base position. Although the book is well-written and contains meticulous and thorough argumentation, it is far from extraordinary: generative linguists are known to make bold hypotheses about the universals of language as the phenotype of the human language faculty’s workings. What does make J’s discussion compelling—whether one agrees with her claims or not—is that she grounds her arguments not in the customary repertory of Germanic and Romance, but in a survey of 530 languages, out of which some 180 are actually exemplified and discussed in varying degrees of detail in the text. The point here is certainly not to question the merit of detailed and indepth studies of single or related languages in our understanding of universal grammar: this ought to be evident. Nevertheless, J’s work reflects Frederick Newmeyer’s suggestion in Language form and language function (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) that, when grammarians make claims about universal grammar principles and the limits of parametric variation, they ought to have a large-scale survey (comparable to that of J’s) at their disposal in order to check their predictions and explain away any apparent counterexamples. Like Mark C. Baker (e.g. The polysynthesis parameter, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) before her, J brings to typology the rigor and explanatory advantages of a coherent theory of grammar—the discussion of functionaltypological accounts of verbal affix ordering (281–92) is quite revealing in this respect. Moreover, J looks into her vast material in considerable detail, and this makes her work of vital importance. To briefly illustrate, we read that Scandinavian and English verbal morphology actually seems to CONTRADICT her generalization that X-AFFIX orders involve head movement of X to the left of the affix (263–73), even though data from numerous other languages