Tohru Seraku

List of John Benjamins publications for which Tohru Seraku plays a role.

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
Seraku, Tohru 2022 Referring to arbitrary entities with placeholdersPragmatics 32:3, pp. 426–451 | Article
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
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
Seraku, Tohru and Nana Tohyama 2020 Grammatical nominalization in Yoron RyukyuanStudies in Language 44:4, pp. 879–916 | Article
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
Seraku, Tohru and Nana Tohyama 2018 The affective construction in Yoron RyukyuanStudies in Language 42:2, pp. 418–454 | Article
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
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