Tohru Seraku
List of John Benjamins publications for which Tohru Seraku plays a role.
Japanese unnun as a meta-discourse placeholder: Exploring its grammatical and functional properties Pragmatics & Cognition 31:1, pp. 156–184 | Article
2024 Previous studies have described a range of placeholder (PH) items. A PH fills in the grammatical slot of a target that a speaker is unable or unwilling to produce. This paper argues that Japanese unnun, an expression wholly underdescribed in the literature, serves as a PH and that it may also be… read more
Referring to arbitrary entities with placeholders Pragmatics 32:3, pp. 426–451 | Article
2022 A speaker/writer uses a placeholder (PH) to fill in the syntactic slot of a target word when she has no immediate access to the word or prefers to avoid explicitly mentioning it for contextual reasons. In the present article, I point out a hitherto understudied usage of PHs: a speaker/writer who… read more
Mi -nominalizations in Japanese Wakamono Kotoba ‘youth language’ Pragmatics 31:2, pp. 278–302 | Article
2021 This article explores grammatical and functional properties of mi-nominalizations in Japanese Wakamono Kotoba ‘youth language.’ In the standard variety, the suffix -mi nominalizes an adjective stem: fuka-mi ‘deep-nmlz’ (= ‘profoundness’). This suffix is also used in youth language, but its… read more
Grammatical nominalization in Yoron Ryukyuan Studies in Language 44:4, pp. 879–916 | Article
2020 Despite extensive research on Ryukyuan languages, relatively few attempts have been made to describe Ryukyuan nominalization. This paper sets out the agenda for exploring Ryukyuan nominalization with special reference to Yoron Ryukyuan, which, we propose, has four nominalizers: -si, hutu, munu,… read more
The affective construction in Yoron Ryukyuan Studies in Language 42:2, pp. 418–454 | Article
2018 In Yoron Ryukyuan, passives are formed through the verbal suffix ‘-ari’. In this article, we observe that the suffix is used to form a construction distinguished from the standard passives in several respects: (i) attachment of ‘-ari’ to a wide range of predicates, (ii) ‘-ari’ obligatorily… read more
日本言語政策学会 / Japan Association for Language Policy. 言語政策 / Language
Policy 10. 2014: A crosslinguistic and functional approach Studies in Language: Online-First Articles | Article
Policy 10. 2014: A crosslinguistic and functional approach Studies in Language: Online-First Articles | Article
In spontaneous discourse, a communicator may be unable or unwilling to produce certain words for contextual reasons. An effective strategy to overcome such difficulties is the use of a placeholder like whatchamacallit. It has been observed that in some languages, demonstrative-related… read more