Under the direction of Dr. Richard K. Larson, Ms. Hiroko Yamakido will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research concerns dialect variation in Japanese, with focus on adjectival inflection. She will study the variants spoken in seven prefectures that extend from northern to southern Japan, including Hokkaido, Fukushima (or Niigata), Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Kagoshima. The project's core data will be gathered though oral interviews with native speakers, who will be consulted regarding the acceptability and range of meanings of example sentences and phrases involving adjectives. The adjectives include those showing the amibuity in English examples like "OLD friend" (which can mean 'aged friend' or 'long-time friend'), as well as adjectives found in contexts like resultatives ("Mary hammered the metal FLAT"), causatives ("Mary made John HAPPY"), adverbials ("Mary spoke QUICK-ly"), and so-called secondary predicate constructions ("Mary ate the fish RAW"). Ms. Yamakido will also consult published sources available only in the relevant locales and several Japanese dialectologists. The results of her fieldwork will bear on the nature of prenominal adjectives in Japanese: whether they are projected into attributive structures (like "blue house") or into relative clause structures (like "house that is blue").
This research is significant both for theories of generative syntax and semantics generally, and for Japanese dialectology in particular. It will not only advance understanding of Japanese grammar, and the relation between its morphological and syntactic forms; it will also demonstrate the rich diversity within a small sector of the grammar and the importance of cross-dialectal comparison.
