Japanese Linguistics in Use: An Introduction for Language Learners

An Introduction.The present edition expands their scope through three new chapters: Chapter 1 on Japan and its linguistic diversity, Chapter 3 on word classes, and Chapter 16 on speech, thought, and translation.These additions, together with expanded discussions of pragmatics, discourse, language and culture, and multimodal communication, broaden the book's approach to Japanese linguistics beyond the description of linguistic structure.In particular, Chapter 1 situates Japanese within Japan's historical, social, and cultural diversity, while Chapter 16 extends the scope of the book to literary language and translation, including their relevance to advanced language learning.Taken together, these additions and revisions give the volume a broader and more contemporary orientation, integrating structural linguistic analysis with literature, manga, translation, and everyday communication and demonstrating how Japanese functions across diverse social, cultural, and communicative settings.The book is organized into sixteen chapters covering the history of Japanese, its sound system, vocabulary, writing system, grammar, pragmatics, discourse structure, language and culture, literary language, and translation.The chapters progress from foundational linguistic concepts to broader social and literary perspectives.Examples drawn from novels, folktales, manga, newspapers, and everyday conversations demonstrate that linguistic forms are inseparable from the social, cultural,