is a Japanese

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and

author In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...

. He is

Professor Emeritus ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retirement, retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". ...

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1964 and spent his entire career.

Early life

Kuno received his A.B. and A.M. from

Tokyo University The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

where he received a thorough grounding in linguistics under the guidance of

Shirō Hattori was a Japanese academic and writer. Born in Kameyama, Mie, Hattori was a linguist known particularly for his work on premodern Japanese and Japonic languages and the Ainu language. He was a professor at the University of Tokyo.Nussbaum, Louis-Fr ...

. His postgraduate research focused on the

Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages are a language family, family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. The most commonly spoken Dravidian l ...

. It was through S.-Y. Kuroda, an early advocate of Chomskyan approaches to language, that Kuno undertook his first studies in

transformational grammar In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) was the earliest model of grammar proposed within the research tradition of generative grammar. Like current generative theories, it treated grammar as a sys ...

. In 1960 he went to Harvard to work on a

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

project.

Research approach

Kuno is known for his discourse-functionalist approach to

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

known as functional sentence perspective and for his analysis of the syntax of Japanese verbs and particularly the

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

and grammatical characteristics of stativity and the semantic correlates of

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

marking and constraints on

scrambling Scrambling is a mountaineering term for ascending steep terrain using one's hands to assist in holds and balance.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. It can be described as being between hiking and climbing, rock climbing. "A scramble" is a relat ...

. However, his interests are broader. In the preface to the second of a pair of

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

s for Kuno, its editors describe these interests as " xtendingnot only to syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but also to computational linguistics and other fields such as discourse study and the processing of kanji, Chinese characters used in Japan".

The Structure of the Japanese Language

Kuno's most widely read book is his innovative study, ''The Structure of the Japanese Language'', which set out to tackle what nearly all previous grammars of that language had either failed to adequately explain or wholly ignored. The issues he analyses here are a small restricted group of features of the language overall, but of crucial importance for mastery of Japanese, features which 'make Japanese Japanese' and mark it out from other languages, including those, especially, which share the basic SOV structure of that language. The

Subject Subject ( "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness, or ...

Object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an a ...

Verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

word order is a pattern he associates with 4 notable features characteristic of Japanese grammar, namely:- (1) Its postpositional, as opposed to prepositional features.
(2) Its left-branching feature in syntactic analysis.
(3) Its backward working phrase deletion pattern.
(4) Its freedom from constraints to place interrogative words in sentence-initial position. Using the insights of transformational grammar, Kuno sketches out what standard grammars do not tell their readers, i.e., when otherwise normal grammatical patterns ''can not'' be used. In this sense, the work constituted an innovative 'grammar of ungrammatical sentences'.

Bibliography

Kuno's second festschrift contains a fuller bibliography, listing six authored or coauthored books, 17 edited or coedited books and working papers, a book translation, and 120 authored or coauthored papers."Publications by Susumu Kuno", in Ken-ichi Takami ''et al.,'' eds, ''Syntactical and Functional Explorations,'' pp. ix–xvii. *Kuno, Susumu (1966) The augmented predictive analyzer for context-free languages - its relative efficiency. ''Commun. ACM'' 9(11): 810-823. *Kuno, Susumu, Anthony G. Oettinger (1968) Computational linguistics in a Ph.D. computer science program. ''Commun. ACM'' 11(12): 831-836 *Hayashi, Hideyuki, Sheila Duncan, Susumu Kuno (1968) Computational Linguistics: Graphical input/output of nonstandard characters. ''Commun. ACM'' 11(9): 613-618 * Kuno, Susumu, ''et al.'' (1968) ''Mathematical Linguistics and Automatic Translation.'' Cambridge, Mass.: The Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University. * Kuno, Susumu. (1973). ''The structure of the Japanese language''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. . *Kuno Susumu (1973) ''Nihon bunpõ kenkyũ'' (日本文法研究). Tokyo: Taishũkan. *Kuno, Susumu. (1976). Subject, theme, and the speaker's empathy: A re-examination of relativization phenomena. In Charles N. Li (ed.), ''Subject and topic'' (pp. 417–444). New York: Academic Press. . *Kuno Susumu (1978) ''Danwa no bunpõ'' (談話の文法). Tokyo: Taishũkan. *Kuno Susumu (1983) ''Shin Nihon bunpõ kenkyũ'' (新日本文法研究). Tokyo: Taishũkan. *Kuno, Susumu (1987) ''Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and Empathy.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (hard); (paper). *Kuno, Susumu, and Ken-ichi Takami (1993) ''Grammar and Discourse Principles: Functional Syntax and GB Theory.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (hard); (paper). *Kuno, Susumu, and Ken-ichi Takami. ''Quantifier Scope.'' Tokyo: Kurosio, 2002. *Kuno, Susumu, ''et al.'' (2004) ''Studies in Korean Syntax and Semantics.'' Seoul: International Circle of Korean Linguistics. . *Kuno, Susumu and Ken-ichi Takami. (2004) ''Functional constraints in grammar on the unergative-unaccusative distinction''. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. or
Google Books
*Kuno, Susumu and Takami Ken'ichi (高見健一). ''Bun no imi'' (文の意味). Tokyo: Kurosio, 2005. . *Kuno, Susumu ''et al.'' (2006). ''Nihongo kinoteki kobun kenkyu''. Tokyo: Taishukanshoten

Festschrifts

*''Function and Structure: In Honor of Susumu Kuno,'' ed. Akio Kamio and Ken-ichi Takami. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. and . *''Syntactic and Functional Explorations: In Honor of Susumu Kuno,'' ed. Ken-ichi Takami, Akio Kamio, and John Whitman. Tokyo: Kurosio, 2000. .

Notes

External links

Susumu Kuno's website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kuno, Susumu 1933 births Linguists from the United States Japanese expatriates in the United States Linguists from Japan Harvard University alumni Harvard University faculty Living people Syntacticians University of Tokyo alumni Linguists of Japanese Presidents of the Association for Computational Linguistics