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Structural Analysis of Modern Japanese, by Bernard Saint-Jacques. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, Publications Centre, 1971. Pp. xvii + 110.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
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- Type
- Reviews/Comptes rendus
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Fall 1971 , pp. 27 - 62
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1971
References
1 According to the copyright page, “parts of this book have been translated from Analyse structurale de la syntaxe du japonais moderne, © 1966 by Salesian Press, Tokyo. Published by Librairie C. Klincksieck, Paris.” How much of the book under review is a translation, and who is responsible for the translation, are not made clear. To avoid getting involved in reviewing more than one book at a time, I have not compared the volume under review with the 1966 Analyse structurale, and treat this 1971 Structural analysis as if it were a totally new, and independent, publication. For a review of the 1966 Analyse structurale, the reader should consult Fillmore, Charles J., Language 45.209–16 (1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 For the purposes of this review I will follow Saint-Jacques in his practice of citing romanized Japanese without indication of the pitch configurations of the forms cited; since his citations all lack pitch indications, to include them on Japanese forms that I introduce into the discussion would, in effect, burden the reader of this review with two different systems of romanization, and that to no great purpose.
3 Even the Japanese word-order of this key example of Saint-Jacques leaves something to be desired; the sequence senshū watakushi wa … strikes Tokyo speakers as somewhat less than normal usage, and my informants would generally prefer watakushi wa senshū … for this context.
4 Jorden, Eleanor H., The syntax of modern colloquial Japanese (Baltimore: 1955) [= Language Dissertation 52], p. 2.Google Scholar
5 The locus classicus for all these traditional Western views of the nature of language and the ‘truth of names’ is, of course, Plato’s Cratylus. The Greek philosophical schools were able to persist in their almost entirely ludicrous views concerning language largely because (like too many contemporary Western linguists) they knew but little of any language except their own.
6 Still, we must not forget that,
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games; …
… above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover -
But the cat himself knows, and will never confess.
( Eliot, T. S., The Complete Poems and Plays [New York, 1952] p. 149.Google Scholar)
7 Bernard Bloch on Japanese, edited with an introduction and analytic index by Roy Andrew Miller (New Haven: 1970), p. xxxiii.
8 A long passage cited by the author (pp. 29-30) from what he evaluates as “an excellent paper” by John J. Chew, Jr. provides vivid evidence for the profound penetration of ‘analysis by translation’ into almost every facet of contemporary linguistic speculation. Even when the transformationalists fall out among themselves, all sides to any given dispute immediately take refuge in how a given text-example translates into or from one language or another (in Chew’s words, “in rendering into English such subject-less Japanese statements as …,” etc.). To do him justice, Chew is not relying solely on analysis-by-translation in the passage cited; to this technique he also brings the resources of very old-fashioned English school-grammar, with its dichotomy between the ‘logical’ subject and the ‘grammatical’ subject (in ‘it’s cold,’ for example, we were all at one time taught to distinguish between ‘it,’ the ‘grammatical’ subject, and ‘the time,’ which we called the ‘logical’ subject). It hardly needs pointing out that none of this is very new, or very useful, or very likely to tell us anything about the structure of Japanese (or, about the structure of English). Chew’s remarks do not deal with the analysis of either English or Japanese; his subject-matter is rather what happens when you translate from one to the other. In this and all other analysis-by-translation, a question that must always be asked is, why translate into English, or into French? (If we agree with Saint-Jacques that the “major European languages” incorporate within their structures universal norms of cosmic order and truth, then of course this question will not arise.) Why not translate into Korean, or Mongol, or Turkish, and then analyze Japanese on the basis of such translation? If, for example, we were to do our ‘analysis-by-translation’ employing Korean in place of English, we would find overt morphemes corresponding regularly, on a one-to-one basis, to almost everyone of the ‘nuance’ particles that “have no role to play” in Japanese structure, according to Saint-Jacques (p. 48). It should also be noted that, essentially trivial though Chew’s remarks are in their own right, the context in which Saint-Jacques has here cited them only enhances their uselessness for the analysis of Japanese structure, since, at best, what Chew has to say in the passage cited by Saint-Jacques is quite unrelated to the point Saint-Jacques is trying to make.
9 My ‘hesitates’ renders the habakarareru of the original, a secondary formation onto the verb habakaru ‘shuns, avoids, hesitates to use,’ here to be understood as hesitation because of, or in the light of, the system of levels-of-speech and its socio-linguistic requirements. I find it difficult to locate anything at all in Saint-Jacques’s translation that might correspond to this habakarareru, unless it is his “one does not feel it necessary”?
10 This lapsus is as amusing as it is surprising, since in modern spoken Japanese, shiro (with o) is a common name for pet dogs and (less commonly) cats, and the contrast obtaining between this form and the form shirō (with ō), a given name for human males, is, to say the least, a distinctive one! As Bloomfield was fond of pointing out, that which is alike is the same; that which is not, is different.
11 Kiyoharu, Satō, article Taigen … kenkyūshi, in gakkai, Kokugo, eds., Kokugogaku jiten17 (Tokyo, 1969), p. 613a Google Scholar; see also his article Yōgen … kenkyūshi in ibid., p. 933a.
12 Yoshio, Yamada, Kokugo gakushi (Tokyo, 1934), pp. 429–30.Google Scholar
13 Ibid., §10, ‘Go no ruibetsu narabi ni yōgen no katsuyō no ninshiki,’ pp. 391-430.
14 Ibid., pp. 511-12.
15 Satō Kiyoharu, loc. cit., p. 613a
16 Miller, Roy Andrew, ‘Levels of speech (keigo) and the Japanese linguistic response to modernization,’ in Shively, Donald, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture [= Studies in the Modernization of Japan, 5] (Princeton, 1971), pp. 601–67.Google Scholar