Tohru Seraku
List of John Benjamins publications for which Tohru Seraku plays a role.
Articles
2022. Referring to arbitrary entities with placeholders. Pragmatics 32:3, pp. 426–451
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 | Article
2021. Mi-nominalizations in Japanese Wakamono Kotoba ‘youth language’. Pragmatics 31:2, pp. 278–302
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 | Article
2020. Grammatical nominalization in Yoron Ryukyuan. Studies in Language 44:4, pp. 879–916
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, and… read more | Article
2018. The affective construction in Yoron Ryukyuan. Studies in Language 42:2, pp. 418–454
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 | Article