Japanese

Graduate School Faculty of Arts and Letters Tohoku University

Profiles

Professor NARROG Heiko

Affiliations :

Language is the key

In the German Literature department, students with very diverse interests such as literature, art, language, culture, history, film, theater or ecology are enrolled. These interests all have something in common, namely that language is an indispensable key to gain the information that anchors the respective topics in the countries and cultures of the German language sphere. So how is it best possible to learn this language? I believe that language ability gets nurtured through being in contact with the target language through the things that you like most. Things that you like are the best motivation to continue reading, hearing, and eventually speak and write and thus improve your language skills. Generally speaking, learning language “through the ear“ is most effective. Meanwhile, there are not only radio and television accessible through the internet. Podcasts, a rapidly increasing genre in English media communication, are changing the media landscape for German as well. In my classes the priority is on trying to have fun, and learn something about the culture, while learning the language.

  • Research, History
  • Books, papers, etc.
  • Courses
    German Literature (Introductory Reading); German Linguistics (Seminar); German Culture (Advanced Seminar)
    Personal History
    My major is linguistics and Japanese linguistics

    Completed Master’s program at the Philipps University of Marburg
    Received a Ph.D. at the Ruhr-University Bochum
    Completed doctoral program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo

    Career:
    Hokkaido University, Institute of Language and Culture Studies, Assistant Professor
    Tohoku University, Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor
    April 2017 Appointed to current position
    Degree
    Ph.D. (Literature)
    Field
    Language Change; Linguistic Typology
    Research Subject
    Grammaticalization; semantic change; modality
    Affiliation
    The Linguistic Society of Japan; The Society of Japanese Grammar; The Society for Japanese Linguistics; The Linguistic Society of America, Association of Linguistic Typology
    Database of Researchers Information
    http://db.tohoku.ac.jp/whois/detail/b4104d5a3fdfe8d78f305f4b8a02b314.html
  • Books
    Modality in Japanese: The Layered Structure of the Clause and Hierarchies of Functional Categories. John Benjamins, 2009
    The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization. Oxford University Press, 2011
    Modality, Subjectivity, and Semantic Change. A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Oxford University Press, 2012
    The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2015
    Academic Papers
    “Modality, mood, and change of modal meanings – a new perspective,” in Cognitive Linguistics 16/4, 2005, 677-731
    “Voice and non-canonical marking in the expression of event-oriented modality – a cross-linguistic study,” in Linguistic Typology 14/1, 2010, 71-126
    “The order of meaningful elements in the Japanese verbal complex,” in Morphology 20/1, 2010, 205-237
    “Beyond intersubjectification: Textual uses of modality and mood in subordinate clauses as part of speech-act orientation,” in English Text Construction 5/1, 2012, 29-52
    “Topic phrases in conditional and causal clauses – evidence for different degrees of clause integration,” in Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 20, 2015, 143-162

Research

Japanese