Handbook of Japanese Lexicon and Word Formation

This volume presents a comprehensive survey of the lexicon and word formation processes in contemporary Japanese, with particular emphasis on their typologically characteristic features and their interactions with syntax and semantics. Through contacts with a variety of languages over more than two thousand years of history, Japanese has developed a complex vocabulary system that is composed of four lexical strata: (i) native Japanese, (ii) mimetic, (iii) Sino-Japanese, and (iv) foreign (especially English). This hybrid composition of the lexicon, coupled with the agglutinative character of the language by which morphology is closely associated with syntax, gives rise to theoretically intriguing interactions with word formation processes that are not easily found with inflectional, isolate, or polysynthetic types of languages.

Auteur

Taro Kageyama, NINJAL; Hideki Kishimoto, Kobe University, Japan

Résumé

This handbook is an enormous asset for the linguistic research community at large. Japanese is a language full of fascinating phenomena in the domain of word formation and its relation to syntax, and thus an important test bed for theories of the architecture of grammar. With its detailed description of the facts and its impressive list of renowned scholars of Japanese, this volume is a reliable guide and a source of inspiration for further research.
Geert Booij, Professor Emeritus, University of Leiden

This is both the most comprehensive and most accessible work yet on the lexicon, morphology, and word formation in Japanese, a language whose rich vocabulary has a complex and layered history that is reflected in the depth and breadth of the modern idiom. The editors have brought together from around the world the leading scholars on the many topics that comprise this fascinating subject. The book will be a benchmark for many years to come.
Mark Aronoff, Distinguished Professor, Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University