Linguisten-Seminar: Forum japanisch-germanistischer Sprachforschung. Band 6 Probleme der deutschen Syntax: Wortstellung, Kasus, Paradoxien

This volume is a compilation of some of the lectures and research findings presented at the 48th Linguisten-Seminar (LS) of Nihon Dokubun Gakkai (“Japanese Society for German Studies”), held from August 29 to September 1, 2022. The LS, which is an annual four-day seminar, features a professor from a German university as a guest lecturer delivering three keynote lectures, as well as Japanese participants presenting their research findings in German. Established in 1972, the LS, which hosts numerous eminent linguists from Germany, has developed a prestigious legacy and tradition. In recent years, being invited to the LS in Japan has been considered a distinguished honor for German linguists—or so we hope. After two online meetings due to COVID-19, the LS mentioned above was the first face-to-face meeting in three years, with all possible infection control measures implemented. German linguistic scholars, including graduate students from across Japan, gathered at a seminar house in Tama City, Tokyo, in camp style. The lecturer invited from Germany was Professor Emeritus Josef Bayer of the University of Konstanz, who is a leading generative grammarian in Germany. He is a thoughtful and friendly Bavarian, whose personality and academic erudition rendered the four-day seminar lively and fruitful.
 
The overall theme of the LS was “Problems in German Syntax: Word Order, Case, and Paradoxes,” which was also the subject of Prof. Bayer’s three keynote lectures. His paper, “Syntactic Form and Interpretive Gaps,” which is included in this volume, presents an incisive summary of the LS talks on “paradoxes”—phenomena that elude casual observation but reveal intriguing complexities upon careful examination. The discussion is based on data from various languages, with emphasis on German. Consequently, this paper is of interest to general linguists, German language researchers (primarily German teachers), and German language learners. Additional research presentations at the LS resulted in three papers included in this volume, centered on the themes of “sein+zu-infinitive constructions,” “transitive expletive constructions,” and “free datives,” respectively. These collaborative works were coauthored by mid-career/experienced researchers and graduate students/young researchers, thus demonstrating that the LS is steadily fulfilling its function as an avenue for fostering young researchers.
 
This collection has been digitized since the 45th LS held in 2017 (published in the spring of 2019) and is available in J-Stage. Previously, it was titled “Akten des xx. Linguisten-Seminars” (Record of the xx. Linguisten-Seminar); however, with digitization, the publication was renamed “Linguisten-Seminar: Forum japanisch-germanistischer Sprachforschung” (Linguisten-Seminar: Forum for Japanese-German Language Research).
 

(Written by INABA Jiro, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2024)