Chapter 9 discusses the SO preference observed in the domain of language production, i.e., that sentences with SO orders are more frequently produced than sentences with OS orders in many languages. Although the language production mechanism is often assumed to be universal, the range of languages investigated so far is typologically quite limited. We conducted a sentence production experiment with a picture description task to clarify word order selection in Kaqchikel. In this experiment, participants verbally described the target pictures with a simple sentence. Speakers of Kaqchikel had a general preference for producing the SVO order over the VOS order. This is consistent with the prediction of the UCV, but not with that of the IGV. Therefore, the SO word order might be a universal preference in sentence production, which is in line with the results of previous studies.

The experimental studies on Kaqchikel reviewed so far suggest that the cognitive load during sentence comprehension is primarily determined by grammatical processes operating on linguistic representations, whereas word order selection in sentence production more faithfully reflects conceptual processing at the stage of event apprehension and preverbal message construction. In particular, agent-first orders are likely to be selected over others because of the conceptual saliency of agents. If this conjecture is on the right track, we would expect that the cognitive load during sentence production is higher for SVO sentences than for VOS sentences because the production of a sentence surely includes, as its central part, the construction of linguistic representations, and the grammatical processes involved in this are presumably similar to those involved in the comprehension of a parallel sentence, although there may be some differences. Chapter 10 reports on an experiment to verify this prediction. The results of this experiment support the conclusion that, although Kaqchikel speakers preferentially use the SVO word order because of the saliency of the subject, SVO sentences require more processing resources than VOS sentences both in comprehension and in production.

Chapter 3 reports behavioral experiments with a sentence plausibility judgment task in Kaqchikel to test predictions by the Individual Grammar View and the Universal Cognition View. In this task, Kaqchikel sentences in one of the three commonly used orders (VOS, SVO, and VOS) were presented in a random order to participants through headsets. The participants were asked to judge whether each sentence was semantically plausible and to push a YES button for correct sentences or a NO button for incorrect sentences as quickly and accurately as possible. The time from the beginning of each stimulus sentence until a button was pressed was measured as the reaction time. Semantically natural sentences were processed faster in the VOS order than in the SVO or VSO orders, which suggests that VOS is easier to process than SVO or VSO. These results are compatible with the prediction of the IGV, but not with the prediction of the UCV, showing that the SO preference in sentence comprehension is not fully grounded in the universal properties of human cognition; rather, processing preference may be language-specific to some extent, reflecting syntactic differences in individual languages.

Just as the world is imagined as consisting of nations and conceived of as an international assemblage in modernity, the modern world projects the Babelian vision of a single humanity fragmented into many individual languages. This vision of the international juxtaposition of languages cannot be apprehended unless the modern regime of translation is taken into account, according to which two languages are postulated as distinct and individuated unities. This chapter investigates how a new set of presumptions led to a particular representation of two distinct languages as individuated, countable, and comparable unities between which translation is to take place. The modern regime of translation represents the event of translation in terms of two separate figures or schemata, just like two distinct territories of state sovereignties in the international world as sanctioned by the system of international law (Jus Publicum Europaeum).

Chapter 4 demonstrates that Korean has deeply influenced its immediate language neighbors: Japanese and Jurchen-Manchu. The Japanese-Korean parallels discussed here have often been presented as proof of their genetic relationship. However, the chapter argues that the overwhelming majority of these parallels are found only in Central Japanese, the Japonic language, with which Korean was in immediate and direct contact. On the other hand, most of the Korean-Jurchen/Manchu comparisons dealt with in this chapter have not previously been discussed. With few exceptions, they are found only in Jurchen and Manchu but not in other Tungusic languages. These exceptions are easily explained as loans from Jurchen or Manchu into the neighboring Southern or Northern Tungusic languages; they are never found in those Northern Tungusic languages, such as Ewenki and Ewen that are located outside of the area.

Chapter 2 introduces the eighteen major camps created in Australia to intern “enemy aliens,” as well as overseas internees/refugees and POWs, as an expanding military-camp typology, an extension of the punitive-space typologies that had historically filtered entry into the continent. Unlike in other case studies, the proximity of POW and internee populations to both theaters of conflict forced Australia to devise evermore complex schemes that would segregate nationals of belligerent countries, as well as the political factions within them. The centerpiece of this chapter is the Waranga Basin’s Tatura group of seven camps – the key camp cluster in Victoria.

Since the early development of modern syntactic theory, empirical data from three major East Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, have often challenged empirical generalizations and theoretical proposals based on data from the better-studied Indo-European languages, especially English. Experimental syntax also began with studies of phenomena in English and other major Indo-European languages. More recently, however, a growing number of experimental syntactic studies have focused on East Asian languages, especially in the past decade. This chapter highlights three phenomena explored in the rapidly growing body of experimental syntactic research with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean: (i) split intransitivity, (ii) quantifier scope, and (iii) wh-in-situ. The goal of the chapter is to show that, while the literature on East Asian experimental syntax is still at an early stage, it has already accumulated interesting experimental data on syntactic phenomena with important theoretical implications.

This chapter explores a representative cross-section of heritage languages, in Spanish-speaking Latin American nations and in Brazil. The presentation is organized by the circumstances that gave rise to heritage language enclaves: voluntary immigration, including recruitment efforts by Latin American governments, immigration of religious minorities. Immigration resulting from contract labor, and continent-internal migration, often resulting from economic hardship. None of the heritage languages enjoys official recognition, but some encompass entire communities while others have dwindled to small groups of speakers. Among the heritage languages examined are German and Mennonite Low German, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, Haitian Creole, Japanese, and American, British, and Creole English as well as transplanted varieties of Spanish and Portuguese. Attitudes toward heritage languages as well as linguistic self-esteem of speakers are equally diverse, ranging from ethnic pride to scorn, and the discussion includes an overview of circumstances that both favor and endanger heritage language maintenance.

Chapter 13 provides a case study for cross-cultural discourse analysis, by studying war crime apologies performed by representatives of the Japanese and German states. The term ‘war crime Apologise’ (or simply ‘war apology’) refers to a public ritual speech centering on the speech act Apologise, realised by a ratified person (Goffman, 1967) – usually a representative of the state or a state minister – following crimes which were perpetrated during a wartime situation. War Apologise discourse represents a form of political rather than interpersonal Apologise, which can bring about reconciliation, but not necessarily so. Along with illustrating how the unit of discourse can be systematically compared across linguacultures, the chapter also illustrates that cross-cultural pragmatics provides a highly innovative way of engaging in the study of language and politics because it allows us to consider controversial and emotively loaded political phenomena, such as war crime apologies, from a non-ideologised angle.

In this chapter, the framework proposed in Chapter 2 is applied to the history of Japanese. The discourse markers studied are dakedo, demo, douride, ga, jijitsu, sate, and wake. The findings presented are in support of the hypothesis proposed in Section 1.5, according to which discourse markers are the joint product of two separate mechanisms, with each of the mechanisms accounting for specific properties of discourse markers.

This chapter examines Asian-Latin American (literary) studies, as both a methodology and dynamic cultural production, first by tracing its precarious relation to established academic disciplines (area studies, ethnic studies, literary studies), and second by analyzing the literature of two Peruvian writers of Asian descent - Doris Moromisato and Siu Kam Wen - the former a queer poet of Okinawan descent and the latter a first-generation Chinese immigrant writer. I focus on Doris Moromisato’s literary texts that explore the figure of the dekasegi - the Latin Americans of Japanese descent who work in Japan as migrant workers - and Siu Kam Wen’s novel Viaje a ĺtaca that highlights the centrality of the Chinese coolie in Latin American history. The racialized and gendered figures of both the coolie and the dekasegi embody the complex intersections between race-class-gender-sexuality and labor in global capitalism, thereby calling into question dominant notions of nation, subjectivity, and migration. Furthermore, by troubling the boundaries of epistemological frameworks and working against the grammar of US exceptionalism, I contend that Asian-Latin American studies engages in an “Asian Americanist critique” that draws on alternative narratives and critical histories to envision counterhegemonic subjectivities and undermined global connectivities.

Chierchia (2010) argues that object mass nouns constitute a good testing ground for theories of the mass/count distinction, given that these nouns constitute a non-canonical type of mass noun that seems to be restricted to number marking languages (excluding outliers like Greek which admit plural morphology on mass nouns). Taking this idea as a springboard, in this paper, we pose the questions: Are there object mass nouns in classifier languages such as Japanese? What does the answer to this question mean for semantic accounts of the mass/count distinction in classifier languages?

This chapter reviews research examining the acquisition of English /r/ and /l/ by native Japanese (NJ) speakers from the perspective of the revised Speech Learning Model. The research shows that the English liquids can be learned after the end of the so-called “critical period” for speech learning, but that the two liquids are learned in different ways. This derives from the fact that the English /r/ is perceived to be more dissimilar phonetically from the Japanese liquid, /R/, than English /l/ is. NJ speakers who have received a substantial amount of English input produced and perceived English /r/ with high levels of accuracy due to the formation of a new phonetic category for English /r/. The lower level of accuracy observed for English /l/ is attributed to the formation of a composite Japanese /R/-English /l/ category based on the Japanese /R/ and English /l/ productions to which Japanese-English bilinguals have been exposed. The SLM-r predicts that bilinguals will continue to produce and perceive English /l/ less accurately than English /r/, regardless of how much English input they have received, and that learning the English liquids will induce modifications in how NJ speakers will produce and perceive their native /R/.

Vowels are said to be less distinctive in prenasal context. The “pin/pen” merger in the Southern United States is a good example. This study attempts to investigate the effects of the postvocalic nasal on the identification and discrimination of American English vowels by native speakers of American English (NE) and Japanese (NJ). These two groups of participants identified six American English (AE) monophthongs /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ʌ/ and discriminated six vowel pairs /i/-/ɪ/, /ɛ/-/ɪ/, /æ/-/ɛ/, /æ/-/ɑ/, /æ/-/ʌ /, and /ɑ/-/ʌ / in prenasal context. NJ also identified these American English vowels in terms of Japanese vowel categories. The results revealed that, overall, NE outperformed NJ in both identification and discrimination. In addition, how AE vowels were perceptually mapped to Japanese vowels predicted NJ’s discrimination. However, both groups’ performances were found to be poorer in the prenasal context when compared to their previous performances in the preplosive context (Nozawa & Wayland 2012), and NJ were more adversely (but differently) affected by nasalization than NE.

Accents in second language speech have multiple perceptual consequences, including breakdown in communication and undesirable judgements about accented speakers. Whereas perceived accents are likely influenced by various acoustic variables, it is not clear which acoustic variables influence the perceived accents the most and whether such important predictors of accents change as learners’ proficiency develops. Here we report a study that has examined acoustic sources of foreign accent in second language Japanese produced by American learners at different instructional levels, including beginning and intermediate late learners and early bilinguals. We collected speech samples from these learners as well as a control group of native speakers, and measured 27 segmental and prosodic variables. These acoustic variables were related to accent rating scores obtained from native listeners. Confirmatory analyses showed that 24 out of 27 variables tested were reliably associated with listeners’ accentedness judgements. Exploratory analyses showed that prosodic features were most predictive of beginning to intermediate late learners’ accents, whereas vowel features were most predictive of early bilinguals’ accents. These results shed light on issues related to the acoustic sources of foreign accent and the development of second language speech.