Speaker
Professor Tohru SERAKU
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
Tohru Seraku is a professor in the Department of Japanese Interpretation and Translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. Born in Ibaraki, Japan, he received a BA in French Literature from Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan, and an MA in Education from Keio University, Japan. He then studied in the UK, obtaining an MA in Pragmatics and a DPhil in General Linguistics. Before moving to South Korea, he worked as a teaching fellow at SOAS University of London. His primary research interests lie in pragmatics and its interfaces with syntax and semantics. In recent years, his research has developed along two main fronts. The first strand explores so-called ‘placeholders’, or dummy expressions such as thingy and whatchamacallit, in the word’s languages, with special reference to Japanese, from multifaceted perspectives incorporating formal, functional, and cognitive approaches. The second strand investigates Japanese syntax, especially rightward displacement phenomena, such as clefts, relatives, and postposing, through the modelling of incremental parsing within Dynamic Syntax. He has published widely in international journals including Glossa, Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Logic, Language and Information, Journal of Pragmatics, Language Sciences, Lingua, Linguistics, Pragmatics, and Studies in Language.

Event Details
This talk explores the syntax of Japanese ‘gapping’, also known as ‘right-node raising constructions’ or ‘verbless conjunctions’, depending on the analysis, and loosely related to English examples such as Ken drank beer, and Naomi wine. Its primary objectives are threefold. First, it uncovers a set of new data regarding the licensing pattern of wh-words in gapping structures. Second, it discusses their potential challenges for previous studies within mainstream generative grammar. Finally, it outlines an account of these data from the dynamic perspective of grammar modelling, incorporating incremental parsing into its core architectural feature and expressing this in terms of constraints on structure building. The analysis is specifically formalised within Dynamic Syntax (Cann, Ronnie, Kempson, Ruth, & Marten, Lutz. 2005. The Dynamics of Language. New York: Academic Press). Due to time constraints, our focus will be on the first two objectives: the presentation of new data on Japanese gapping and the discussion of their implications for formal syntax research. As for the third objective, the essence of the dynamic analysis is presented informally, avoiding unnecessary formal details. Time permitting, several broader implications of this talk are discussed for cross-linguistic research on gapping, processing studies, and computational implementations.

Registration Link/ Event Page
No Registration is Required

Enquires
lin@cuhk.edu.hk