Early Japanese: A Reader's Rhetoric of Grammar

FAIN: FA-53539-07

Charles Joseph Quinn
Ohio State University (Columbus, OH 43210-1349)

The project's goal is final write-up of a book that explains and illustrates grammar as a resource for configuring discourse in early Japanese texts, in order to facilitate reading them more perspicuously. It integrates original research with relevant philological, linguistic and literary scholarship, in a style and format accessible to students of early literature, historians of the Japanese language, and historians and linguists more generally. Its account of how text--meaningful, connected language--emerges with the help of grammatical and lexical cues also offers historical insights into similar phenomena today.