Research on Japanese and Korean linguistics has been quite sparse. Yet from the research available, many linguists agree that Japanese and Korean are typologically quite similar, so a linguistic phenomenon in one often has a counterpart in the other. This similarity has encouraged further study of one language in the hopes of extrapolating the findings to the other language.
This volume contributes to the expansion of advanced linguistic studies in both Japanese and Korean by juxtaposing recent research performed on both languages. Through such methods as discourse analysis, contrastive linguistic analysis, and the cognitive approach, contributors discuss Japanese and Korean phonetic, syntactic, and semantic structural similarities. While some papers explore the historical roots of Japanese linguistics and its impact on present-day Japanese and Korean, others investigate the languages' vowel and consonant systems. The diversity of topics presented is apparent in contributors' discussion of the importance of syllable structure, difficulties in possession construction, acquisition of passive construction in Japanese, and the influence of sentence structure on the interpretation of Korean words. The selected works in this volume were presented at the Ninth Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference held at The Ohio State University in 1999.
