The Science of Language: An Approach from Linguistics

Kyoko Ohara (Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Liberal Arts)

I teach English courses mainly to students from first-year undergraduates to graduate students at the Faculty of Science and Technology, but my specialty is linguistics. When you hear the word "linguist," many of you might imagine a scholar who boasts extensive knowledge of various languages such as Chinese, Arabic, and Swahili, in addition to English and French. Unfortunately, I can speak neither Arabic nor Swahili. You might also imagine that there is a "correct" way to use Japanese and English, and that linguists, as experts and masters of language, are people who discover, record, and promote such "correct" usage. However, I am not particularly interested in "correct" language use. Instead, what interests me as a linguist is the question, "What is the nature of the linguistic knowledge that humans possess?" In recent years, various methodologies have been attempted in linguistics, and diverse scientific studies on language have also been conducted from the fields of psychology, education, neuroscience, and computer science, yielding many interesting results.

The actual object of study in linguistics is not "correct" language use, but the total body of knowledge an individual speaker has about a language—that is, the knowledge of the regularities of that language within the individual's brain and mind. You are probably not usually aware that the language you use so casually has regularities. We become conscious of these regularities when we encounter Japanese spoken by non-native speakers, or when we feel a sense of strangeness in the language spoken by people of different generations or in the dialects of people from different regions. For example, when you hear a non-native speaker of Japanese say "ashita *ni* ikimasu" (I will go *on* tomorrow), you may understand the meaning but think to yourself, "I would just say 'ashita ikimasu' (I will go tomorrow)."

My research also focuses on the question, "What is the nature of the knowledge that native speakers of Japanese possess about their language?" It is not simply a combination of the meanings of words listed in a Japanese dictionary and the knowledge of Japanese grammar written in grammar books, but rather something that also includes our common sense and context related to the world around us. For example, if you ask a friend, "Are you going to the party tonight?" and they reply, "I have a makeup exam tomorrow," you understand that your friend does not intend to go to the party. At a party, you eat and drink with friends. On the other hand, before a makeup exam, most people study to prepare for it. Therefore, when asked about their attendance at "tonight's party," and they mention "tomorrow's makeup exam" in their response, you use context and common sense to infer that their reply means, "I have to study for the makeup exam tomorrow, so I can't go to the party tonight."

Thus, my hypothesis is that to understand the meaning of a sentence in the real world, it is necessary to consider the background foundation and knowledge, such as the context in which the words in the sentence are used and common sense. The project I have been working on for the past several years, called the "Japanese FrameNet," aims to clarify this background foundation and knowledge that native speakers have about Japanese, provide abundant example sentences, and organize it as a lexical information resource. It is linked with "FrameNet," an English lexical information resource being built at Berkeley in the United States, and the Spanish FrameNet in Barcelona, Spain, and a project in Saarbrücken, Germany, also use the same framework as the English FrameNet. In the future, by linking them together, we may be able to build a multilingual information resource for Japanese, English, German, and Spanish. Ultimately, we also aim to create a lexical information resource that will be useful for learners of Japanese and for natural language processing systems in computers.

In addition to linguistics, there are various approaches to the study of language, including psychology, education, neuroscience, and computer science. Although cooperation in research involving multiple academic fields can be difficult, the contributions of multiple disciplines have significantly clarified many things about language that were once considered "mysteries," to the point where they are now considered merely "difficult problems." As you engage with academia, I hope you will remember to change your perspective on familiar things, to have multiple viewpoints, and not to be confined to a single academic field.