Susumu Kuno

Susumu Kuno (久野 暲[1] Kuno Susumu, August 11, 1933-) is a Japanese linguist and author. He is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1964 and spent his entire career. He received his A.B. and A.M. from Tokyo University where he received a thorough grounding in linguistics under the guidance of Shirō Hattori. His postgraduate research focused on the Dravidian languages. It was through S.-Y. Kuroda, an early advocate of Chomskyan approaches to language, that Kuno undertook his first studies in transformational grammar. In 1960 he went to Harvard to work on a machine translation project.

Kuno is known for his discourse-functionalist approach to syntax known as functional sentence perspective and for his analysis of the syntax of Japanese verbs and particularly the semantic and grammatical characteristics of stativity[2] and the semantic correlates of case marking and constraints on scrambling.[3] However, his interests are broader. In the preface to the second of a pair of festschrifts for Kuno, its editors describe these interests as "[extending] not only to syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but also to computational linguistics and other fields such as discourse study and the processing of kanji, Chinese characters used in Japan".[4]

The Structure of the Japanese Language

Kuno's most widely read book is his innovative study, The Structure of the Japanese Language, which set out to tackle what nearly all previous grammars of that language had either failed to adequately explain or wholly ignored. The issues he analyses here are a small restricted group of features of the language overall, but of crucial importance for mastery of Japanese, features which 'make Japanese Japanese' and mark it out from other languages, including those, especially, which share the basic SOV structure of that language. The Subject-Object-Verb word order is a pattern he associates with 4 notable features characteristic of Japanese grammar, namely:-

(1) Its postpositional, as opposed to prepositional features.
(2) Its left-branching feature in syntactic analysis.
(3) Its backward working phrase deletion pattern.
(4) Its freedom from constraints to place interrogative words in sentence-initial position.[5]

Using the insights of transformational grammar, Kuno sketches out what standard grammars do not tell their readers, i.e., when otherwise normal grammatical patterns can not be used. In this sense, the work constituted an innovative 'grammar of ungrammatical sentences'.[6]

Bibliography

Kuno's second festschrift contains a fuller bibliography, listing six authored or coauthored books, 17 edited or coedited books and working papers, a book translation, and 120 authored or coauthored papers.[7]

Festschrifts

Notes

  1. ↑ The character 暲, for Susumu, is unusual and may not be rendered correctly even on some computers capable of rendering most Japanese. It is Unicode 66B2 and may be viewed as a graphic at decodeunicode.org. Because it is unusual, Susumu is sometimes represented on the web via the geta kigō mark (meaning that the correct character is known but unavailable), given instead as katakana, or (for example in the OPAC of the Japanese National Diet Library) as both.
  2. ↑ Summarized in for example Matsuo Soga, Tense and Aspect in Modern Colloquial Japanese (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press; ISBN 0-7748-0158-1), pp. 85–86.
  3. ↑ The correlates and constraints are summarized in such relatively accessible works as Natsuko Tsujimura, An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996).
  4. ↑ "Preface" to Ken-ichi Takami et al., eds, Syntactical and Functional Explorations, p. vii.
  5. ↑ Susumu Kuno, The Structure of the Japanese Language, MIT Press, 1973,p.4
  6. ↑ Susumu Kuno, The Structure of the Japanese Language, ibid. p.ix
  7. ↑ "Publications by Susumu Kuno", in Ken-ichi Takami et al., eds, Syntactical and Functional Explorations, pp. ix–xvii.

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