Anyone read this or checked it out? http://www.amazon.com/Systemic-Functiona...0826455239 - It's ridiculously expensive.

“This book is the first to provide a systemic functional interpretation of the grammar of Japanese, describing it as a resource for making meaning rather than as a set of formal rules. It offers a general overview of all the major systems of Japanese grammar, covering the three major functions of language - the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual functions. The account of the grammar of Japanese is based on extensive corpus material and throughout the book the account is shown at work in Japanese discourse analysis. The book is also intended to extend our understanding of the semiotic potential of Japanese, and of language in general, for making meanings, taking into account both grammatical and lexical resources and linking them in a unified description of the lexicogrammar of Japanese.” (2007)

When a book is that expensive, you can be sure that its because its a required textbook for some class somewhere.

This book seems to be divided into two volumes for some reason, so I guess volume 1 is like 300 pages and the second volume is 150 or so. I'll wait for the movie.

Edit: Apparently both volumes are in the same book, so nevermind about that issue. Although that makes me wonder how someone was selling just volume 2?

The $40 is for volume 2 only.

I also found this one: Systemic Functional Perspectives of Japanese

“While there have been occasional Systemic Functional treatments of Japanese before, this is the first volume dedicated to Japanese from a Systemic Functional perspective. This book is divided into descriptions and applications. The descriptions are further divided into the three metafunctions: textual, interpersonal and ideational. The applications of the descriptions are divided into education and computing. The contributions on education are a mixture of work on genres in Japanese and English, and applications of Systemic Functional theory to teaching Japanese as a second language. The contributions on computing present the application of Systemic Functional theory to the development of a Japanese language-based computer operating system. This volume features a foreword by Noboru Yamaguchi, one of the first linguists to explore Systemic Functional perspectives of Japanese. ”

Apparently they're both the first, though this one hasn't come out yet. Looks cheaper and more oriented towards application, or at least pedagogy, perhaps.

Looks like somebody found volume one at a local uni.
Email me if you're interested, and I'll try to get back to you within 24 hours.

When I'll get volume 2 I'll probably MUL the whole thing. Volume 2 should interest you nest0r, it's fully about ideational grammar with a chapter on transitivity (though it's only a page long).

Still unable to find a ‘cheap’ copy of this, but I did find what I think is Teruya's pilot work on the topic, from: Language typology: a functional perspective

Metafunctional profile of the grammar of Japanese - ~60 pages, so I suppose I'll make do.

Need more work like this on non-Western languages. More are being released in recent years, I wonder if it's because of the reliance on corpus-based approaches for register analysis.

I also found this: Style shifting in Japanese

Awh I glanced through that last book nest0r. Senko Maynard is a pretty good writer she is a researcher/director at my school so I like her stuff. Haven't met her yet but I plan to after I feel like I won't disgrace her with my abysmal Japanese.

That's cool. It looks like an interesting book. It's definitely claimed a top spot on my reading list.

Oh, I found a copy of the first book (the Teruya book), both volumes, at one of the UNC libraries, just 10 minutes away from me. I saw the $360 on Amazon for a new copy... wow. That's nuts.

I can't imagine anything that would make a book worth that much, unless they have dryads lick the edge of every page to magically glue it into the binding or something. Maybe the cover is gorgon leather? But I digress.

If I get a chance to go on campus in the next couple of weeks, I'll check it out. JLPT prep is kind of eating all of my spare time right now... and going on campus is always a royal pain in the butt.

Picked up the Teruya book, both volumes, today at the library. Woof. That's some heavy reading. I'm positive that there's some great stuff in there, but the problem is that it's hidden in a wall of jargon.

I'll try to make some time at some point.

The more interesting book I picked up was "Japanese Grammar: The Connecting Point" by Kimihiko Nomura, a professor at Cal State Chico, who has been teaching Japanese for over 30 years. It's a new book (2010), and he has a different approach to teaching Japanese grammar that I'd like to check out.

Nomura's take is that Japanese is an agglutinative language, and as such, you can just sort of whack things on top of other things if you know which things go with which other things, and you have the right framework to work from. He pegs it all on something he calls an Eight Level Conjugation (ELC) system and a Japanese Verb Expression (JVE) formula.

Basically, you use the JVE like this: to build a verb-based expression: (Vs = Verb Stem; Fx = "Formative Level X"; Suf = suffix; N = Noun)

Vs+Fx+Suf : for verbals with a variety of auxiliary expressions
or
Vs+Fx : for casual speech
or
Vs+Fx+N : to create subordinate clauses that modify nouns

... etc.

So he breaks everything down like that. Don't ask me what "Formative Level X" means, I haven't gotten that far in yet. I'm assuming he's talking about random verb formation endings based on what the verb is trying to turn into.

He also goes out of his way to NOT try to cram Japanese into English grammar concepts. Rather than try to shoehorn Japanese grammatical concepts into English grammatical concepts, he wants us to try to understand the native Japanese way of looking at them, and just roll with it.

We'll see.

Downside is that the discussions end at page 190 or so, then boom-- the rest of the book to p. 454 is appendixes. Upside is that there's a lot of interesting stuff in the appendixes, like *thorough* definitions of verbs, verb tenses, etc., and examples.

ISBN for the book is 978-0-7618-5311-4

Does the SFG book not adequately provide an introduction to the concepts? It seemed like in the above initial work it didn't, that it assumed some background knowledge.

Either way, I can tell you that they're intuitive and fairly easy to pick up, which is why I like them so much. The functional focus makes it widely applicable; there's also a lot of overlap of the less SFG-specific and more purely functional/descriptive aspects with pragmatics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, etc. It's sexy, robust stuff. ;p I get the same feeling of excitement from it that I get from Speculative Realism works in philosophy, except this stuff is older and well-established (and I simply hadn't delved deeply into linguistics enough to realize it), if only now surging beyond Indo-European studies.

That's why I'm interested in this book, it might be a useful bridge between older, prominent prescriptive grammar models that are often built around artificial English examples, and the stuff that Japanese scholars come up with more functionally but also more idiosyncratically.

Possible discount on the SFG:

http://www.bookdepository.com/Systemic-F...0826455239

I've never used the vendor, though, so I'm not sure that I trust the company.

Give me a few days to get to the parts with actual Japanese in them, and let me get back to you. It's probably not fair to judge the book by the first chapter. Academic papers/pubs in general are a bit of a slog up front, because there's that awkward introductory stuff where you have cover moving out of the trees, the invention of fire, the wheel, moveable type, etc., just to get the paper moving. (He started with the creation of the universe. Heh.)

From what I read so far, yeah, he seems to define his terms... well, some of them. He defines semiotics, then randomly busts out metalanguages and fourth-order sytstems, then says to go look them up somewhere else if you want to know more about them.

But I don't think they're crucial to the understanding of Japanese in this book, so I'm not going to sweat it. I don't have a lot of time to read this, as I've got N2 looming over me like a hungry buzzard circling a lost rabbit with broken leg... so I need to apportion my time appropriately. 7 weeks. Yay.