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Collaborating with the Laboratory of Language and Information Sciences, the Laboratory of Text Structure and Linguistic Information aims at explicating human linguistic competence. Carefully observing empirical data from various individual languages, we study how and why languages change diachronically and vary synchronically, in terms of syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics. Our special emphasis is on the following fields:
(1) Morphology: The nature of words and morphemes, their syntactic / semantic / phonological structures, and the distinction between possible and impossible words.
(2) Lexical Semantics: The semantic structure of words; in particular, the issues of what their basic semantic templates are like, which aspects of the semantic structure have syntactic reflexes, and what kind of syntactic structure they can occur in.
(3) Diachronic Syntax/ Historical Linguistics/ Dialectology: (i) The nature of diachronic change and synchronic diversity of languages, (ii) Proposal of a theory of the language faculty that allows change and diversity, and (iii) Justification of the theory by logical thinking and corpora studies.
Through these researches, we also aim at making contribution to the theory and practices of language learning/teaching.
Please visit http://ling.human.is.tohoku.ac.jp/change/home.html for our current project called “Language Change and Language Variation Research Unit,” an interdisciplinary research activity organized to pursue our aims from richly diversified perspectives.
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