Research Interests:

My research interests center on linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and historical pragmatics. Since the sociolinguistics course where I was studying at the department of linguistics, Georgetown University Graduate School, includes the whole pragmatics and sociolinguistics, I have a vast research range. From 1995 on, when historical pragmatics was established, I also include this in my research areas.

My current research focus is on the intersection of pragmatics, discourse analysis, and historical pragmatics, that encompasses analysis of present-day Japanese and English conversations and diachronic discourse analysis. Especially, how discourse markers came into being (onomasiological question) attracts interest. Grammaticalization and constructionalization are tools that solve such a puzzle.

Discourse markers (DMs) are first categorized by Dr. Deborah Schiffrin’s volume (1987). In European languages like English, utterance-initial but, indeed, and like, and cos are well known DMs, while in Asian languages like Japanese and Korean, utterance-final -kedo, -koto, -mono, and -wake (Japanese examples) are also counted as DMs. It seems that in any language, the speakers convey their meaning by subtle pragmatic negotiation with utterance-initial and -final DMs.

Linguistic universalness is another important issue. My hypothesis is that not only in agglutinative Asian languages but also in European counterparts, utterance-final pragmatic negotiation is conducted. General Extenders (GEs) in American English like and things (like that) and or anything are examples that conduct such pragmatic negotiation.

I look forward to further exploring the above topics with the students; PhD students, MA students, and undergraduate students.