Toward a critical dialogue across languages and cultures: On native and Western linguistics in modern Japan

Abstract

This paper tries to present a native grammarian’s view of Japanese, articulated in opposition to the analysis of the language based on the notions of ‘Western linguistics’ such as ‘subject’ and ‘tense’. Although Yamaguchi’s particular analysis, provided in section 2, is not shared by all native grammarians of Japanese, it does give an illustrative example of the perspectival stance, or ‘footing’, of a dominant school of National Language Studies ( koku-go-gaku), of which Yamaguchi is a leading figure, towards language and culture. This ‘footing’, as seen in section 2, is characterized by its focus on ‘emic analysis’ and its espousal of nativism, which may be associated with nationalistic essentialism. As such, it gives us an opportunity to observe not only a different grammatical tradition, but also the irreducibly cultural, i.e., (social) pragmatic, dimension of grammatical (and pragmatic) analysis, centrally concerned with the (cross/sub)national identities and (cross/sub)disciplinary perspectives of grammarians, linguistics, and pragmaticists, as briefly suggested in section 1.