Linguistische Typologie und Japanisch

Abstract

Every language is unique as a range of specific cultural-historical phenomena, and so, as a matter of course, is Japanese. The paper argues that this is a trivial point; typological studies will bring insight beyond it. Linguistic typology asks. which constraints hold for a language to be a language, how much can it vary from other languages? In sequence, the paper, thus, takes up 1) typology of morpho-syntactic and lexical structures, 2) historical change of structural types in areal contacts, 3) linguistic behaviour as a social practice and types of such behaviour, and 4) and finally, language as a psychological resource. The fourth question has not yet attained a clear shape, but for 1)-3) it clearly can be shown that Japanese has figured prominently in typological studies and, in each case exhibits features shared with other languages. Japanese has attracted much more attention than other languages that did not belong to the Western domain, in which this kind of linguistics as a scholarly discipline has developed. This attention is due to political and economic concerns of Western states funding linguistic research.