Language and Information Sciences

Research Interests

Linguistics (pragmatics, semantics, discourse analysis, language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, and contrastive linguistics): I have worked particularly on the analysis of the polysemy, multifunctionality, and categorization of grammatical constructions (especially conditional and related constructions, clause-linkage, modality, pragmatic markers, etc.), as well as on the crosslinguistic and developmental study of these constructions and phenomena. My research also deals with spoken discourse (mainly Japanese and English conversations and narratives), treating it from the viewpoint of "discourse and grammar".