Brent de Chene
Professor (emeritus), Waseda University
rovere7 at gmail dot com
My book The Boundary between Grammar and Lexicon: Evidence from Japanese Verb Morphology was published electronically (epub, pdf) by John Benjamins on January 23rd, 2025 and is now available in print as well (webpage here).
The book argues that two distinct strands of research on Japanese and Ryukyuan verbal morphology converge on a unified conclusion concerning the fundamental division between the lexically listed and the freely generated, a conclusion that places derivation and inflection on opposite sides of that boundary.
November, 2024 saw the publication by Columbia University Press of Eclipse, the English translation of a prize-winning Japanese novella with a notoriously difficult text that I undertook jointly with my colleague Charles De Wolf (webpage here).
A statement concerning the background of my two previous books and my research interests circa 2010 can be found here; a brief CV is available here.
Recent Papers
Stem Inalterability in Japonic (to appear in Journal of Japanese Linguistics 41.2)
2022
Syntactic and Lexical -ase- are Distinct Suffixes. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 38: 193-230.
Sanskrit Nominal Stem Gradation without Morphomes. Word Structure 15: 28-54.
2020
On the (Ir)regularity of Dunan Verbal Morphophonology. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 36: 253-289.
r-Epenthesis and the Bigrade Alternation: The Role of Phonological Distance in the Regularization of Japanese Verbal Inflection. Diachronica 37: 178-214.
2019
r-Epenthesis and Ryukyuan. Gengo Kenkyu 155: 101-130.
2017
Root-based Syntax and Japanese Derivational Morphology. On Looking into Words (and Beyond), ed.Claire Bowen, Laurence Horn, and Raffaella Zanuttini, 117-135. Berlin: Language Science Press.
2016
Description and Explanation in Morphophonology: The Case of Japanese Verb Inflection. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 25: 37-80.
2014
Probability Matching Versus Probability Maximization in Morphophonology: The Case of Korean Noun Inflection. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Kobe Shoin 17: 1-13.
Recent Presentations
Reanalysis and Regularization in Morphophonology: Korean Noun Inflection and Beyond University of Hong Kong, October 25, 2018
On the (Ir)regularity of Dunan Verbal Morphophonology 155th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan, Kyoto, November 25, 2017
Reanalysis Triggers in Japanese Morphology (poster) 24th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, Tokyo, October 15, 2016
Japanese Derivational Morphology and Root-based Syntax 152nd Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan, Tokyo, June 25, 2016
The Centrality of Underlying Representations: Evidence from Reanalysis Workshop on the Current Status of Phonological Representations
in Phonology, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, London, September 16, 2015
The Complementarity of Synchronic and Diachronic Explanation in Phonology Workshop on Historical Phonology and Phonological Theory,
48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Leiden, September 4, 2015
The Duality of Phonology: Automatic and Nonautomatic Alternations at the Explanatory Level Workshop on Nonautomatic Alternations in
Phonology, 47th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Poznań, September 11, 2014
A New Corpus of Colloquial Korean and its Applications (with Kevin Tang (poster)) 14th Conference on Laboratory Phonology,
Tokyo, July 26, 2014
Minority Alternations are in the Lexicon (poster) 21st Manchester Phonology Meeting, May 24, 2013
Selected Older Papers
The "Tense" Morphology of Conditionals
The Locus of Agreement Features in the DP
Case and Concord
Prosody and Subject Traces
Topic, Focus, and Quantifier Scope in English