Projects

Formulaicity in Japanese: This project is part of our descriptive and theoretical efforts to demonstrate the way language is non-generatively organized by examining naturally occurring everyday talk, a fundamental human activity. It was initiated by the fellowship given to Tsuyoshi Ono by the Hakuho Foundation in 2014-2015, which now continues with multi-year funding given to Professor Ryoko Suzuki (Keio University) in Japan in 2017. As part of this project, Professor Ritva Laury (University of Helsinki) and Tsuyoshi Ono are currently editing a volume entitled ‘Fixed expressions as units: building language structure and action’.

Ikema Documentation Project: This is a large project to document the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan spoken on small Japanese islands near Taiwan. It involves several researchers from Canada, Japan and the US, and some of the publications from this project are found in the output page of this website. One important aspect of this project is the teaching opportunities it has provided in training future language documentation researchers using Ikema as a model. We now hold an annual documentation workshop on Ikema Island in winter. Most recently, Professor Toshihide Nakayama (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) and Tsuyoshi Ono co-conducted a month long workshop at CoLang 2016 held at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. An outcome of that workshop may be seen in the website created by its participants.

Corpus of Japanese Everyday Talk: We consider everyday conversation as the primary data in our exploration into the mechanism of language as it is a basic human activity. Together with his collaborators, Tsuyoshi Ono has amassed several hundred hours of recordings of naturally occurring Japanese talk and their transcripts starting in the late 1980’s, which will become a companion dataset to the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation which is currently being built by The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. The completion of the latter project will become a major step toward studying Japanese in its most natural contexts, and the addition of our data to the corpus will provide researchers with opportunities to examine the ongoing (re-)structuring of Japanese over the past several decades.