Generally, a language has both “universal” characteristics rooted in the common biological and cognitive heritage of human beings and “individual” characteristics developing from social and cultural differences in human living.

It is important to investigate various aspects of Japanese from the global viewpoint, with due consideration given to the distinction between its universality as a human language and the individuality of the Japanese language itself. With a view to promoting comprehensive studies that could not be made by individuals or universities, the Institute pursues multifaceted and comprehensive studies including not only research on various aspects in the Japanese language such as pronunciation, orthography, grammar, vocabulary, dialects, honorifics and historical changes, but also comparisons with foreign languages and research from interdisciplinary viewpoints in relation to such fields as second language acquisition and natural language processing.

The core research projects are large-scale inter-university projects for which the Institute makes an allout effort toward the academic purpose of elucidating the overall picture of the Japanese language. At present, under the leadership of full professors and invited professors from the four research departments, a total of 13 core projects are being implemented on the national and international levels in cooperation with domestic and overseas researchers and research organizations. Concurrently, middle- and small-scale projects have also started: “original/developing-type collaborative research,” which deals with topics that are novel and rich in originality, and “incubation/discovery-type collaborative research,” which is expected to bring forth a new dimension of research in the future. Additionally, a collaborative research project on Japanese-language education for foreigners has started at the Center for JSL Research and Information, and a set of research projects that are managed by scholars at outside organizations in Japan will also be sponsored.

Core Research Projects

Project Title	Project leader
Phonological Characteristics of the Japanese Lexicon	KUBOZONO Haruo
Syntactic, Semantic, and Morphological Characteristics of the Japanese Lexicon	KAGEYAMA Taro
Modeling of the Ecology of Writing and its Application to Sociolinguistics	YOKOYAMA Shoichi
The Japanese Lexicon: A Rendaku Encyclopedia	Timothy J. VANCE
General Study for Research and Conservation on Endangered Dialects in Japan	KIBE Nobuko
Field Research Project to Analyze the Formation Process of Japanese Dialects	ONISHI Takuichiro
Exploring the Variation in the Contemporary Japanese: Multiple Approaches	AIZAWA Masao
Formation Processes of Japanese Language Varieties and Creoles	SANADA Shinji
Basic Research on Corpus Annotation	MAEKAWA Kikuo
Design of a Diachronic Corpus	KONDO Yasuhiro
Foundation of Corpus Japanese Linguistics	MAEKAWA Kikuo
Adnominal Clauses and the Noun-Concluding Construction: Grammaticalization of Nouns	TSUNODA Tasaku
Modal and Speech-Act Constraints on Clause-Linkage	TSUNODA Tasaku
Universals and Cross-Linguistic Variations in the Semantic Structure of Predicates	Prashant PARDESHI
Study on Teaching and Learning Japanese as a Second Language in a Multicultural Society	SAKODA Kumiko

Original/Developing-Type

Project Title	Project leader
Form and Meaning in Japanese Complex Sentence Constructions	MASUOKA Takashi
Analyzing Large-Scale Dialectal Survey Data from Multiple Perspectives	KUMAGAI Yasuo
Historical Research on Japanese Grammar	AOKI Hirofumi
Contact Dialectology and Sociolinguistic Typology	ASAHI Yoshiyuki
Study on Documents and Languages for Designing a Corpus of Modern Japanese	TANAKA Makiro
Compilation of Japanese Basic Verb Usage Handbook for JFL Learners	Prashant PARDESHI
Interdisciplinary Study on Learning Japanese and the Reality of Language Life of Foreign Permanent Residents in Japan	NOYAMA Hiroshi

Incubation/Discovery-Type

Project Title	Project leader
Empirical Study on the Role of Prosodic Features in Conversations	KOISO Hanae
Structured Description of Kunten-Shiryo (Documents Written in Chinese with Signs for Rendering into Japanese)	TAKADA Tomokazu
The Current States and Changes in the Japanese Spoken in the Metropolitan Area	MITSUI Harumi
Half a Century of Honorifics Usage and Attitudes toward Honorifics: Focusing on the Analysis of Survey Data from Okazaki City, Aichi Prefecture	INOUE Fumio
A study of ongoing changes in modern Japanese	NIINO Naoya
Study of the history of the Japanese language using statistics and machine-learning	OGISO Toshinobu
Development of Classification Indices to Treat a Variety of Texts	KASHINO Wakako
Distribution of Vocabulary and Sentence Structures in Texts	YAMAZAKI Makoto
A Study of Compositional Semantic Representation Based on Contextual Information	YAMAGUCHI Masaya