Acknowledgments

This may sound paradoxical, but at first way expressions did not arouse my interest very much. Having read Jackendoff (1990) and Goldberg (1995), I thought I had a general idea of what way expressions are. It seemed that there was not much left to be further explored. But things changed sometime in 2004, when I read Kuno & Takami (2004). I realized that much remains yet unnoticed about way expressions, which can be uncovered by using corpus data. Such was the (unanticipated) beginning of this book.

Since then I have been working on way expressions on and off (mostly off, during 2017 to 2019, when focus shifted to completing my book on resultatives), until now, having finally managed to conclude this more than twenty-year-long project. I would like to thank all those who have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to this process.

First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my mentors and friends at the University of Tsukuba, my alma mater: the late Minoru Yasui, Minoru Nakau, Yukio Hirose, Nobuhiro Kaga, Toshifusa Oka, as well as many former students of the University of Tsukuba. Interacting with all of these fine people has laid the foundation for what I am today, which fact I will never forget.

I would also like to thank the many authors of papers and books on way expressions, particularly Susumu Kuno and Ken-ichi Takami (with deep regret, following his untimely death), Ray Jackendoff, and Adele Goldberg, for their insightful observations on way expressions, and the audiences at a number of conferences, who gave comments and suggestions on my presentations of incipient material that now comprises sections of this work.

I should also mention the names of those who were of more direct help to me in completing this project. I am grateful to Linda L. Thornburg and Klaus-Uwe Panther, as the editors of this book series, for their help. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers, whose constructive comments helped me to improve this volume greatly. Tony Higgins deserves special mention for kindly and patiently reading the entire manuscript, giving me pertinent comments, and suggesting stylistic improvements.

This work was financially supported by the fund which I received from Kansai University during my sabbatical leave in the academic year of 2025. The financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), NO. 25370558, 2013–2015, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), NO. 20K00691, 2020–2023) is also gratefully acknowledged.

Lastly, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Ai Rin sensei, who has been constantly reminding me of the need to believe in myself. As with my preceding books, I could not have completed this project in its current form without her moral support.

Kobe, Japan

September 2026, S. I.