Preface

要旨

Extract As linguists both working on Korean and Japanese, we have often encountered the need for a textbook on Korean/Japanese linguistics for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and instructors who teach Korean/Japanese language and Korean/Japanese linguistics. We bring different perspectives to the task: one as a teacher of Korean/Japanese and specialist on Korean/Japanese second language learning, one as a researcher in comparative syntax and morphology. This textbook has grown out of the lecture notes for the ‘Structure of Korean’ and ‘Structure of Japanese’ courses that we have taught over the past few decades. Korean and Japanese linguistics attracts the interest of not only students, researchers, and teachers working on the language, but of students and scholars of general linguistics. Korean is well known for such features as its three-way distinction among obstruents without a voicing distinction, case stacking, and multiple nominative and accusative constructions. The Korean writing system has long been a topic of interest to linguists and to those interested in writing systems in general. Japanese is often noted for its direct and indirect passives and the use of multiple writing systems in the same text. Both languages, due to their agglutinative nature, have overt morphological suffixes for grammatical functions including topic and nominative markers and elaborate honorific systems, which fascinates both morphologists and syntacticians. Their relative clauses appear to lack a gap, and yet they prohibit extraction from certain constructions, behaving similarly to European languages, which invites further investigation.

主題