Hiroshi Nara

Chair, Professor
Japanese Language and Linguistics

Hiroshi Nara is the Director of the Konan-Illinois Program at Konan University in Kobe, Japan for AY 2008.

701 Old Engineering Hall
412-624-5579
Fax: 412-624-3458
hnara@pitt.edu

Office Hours
Monday 9-10:00 and by appointment

My research interests encompass a number of different areas. My initial academic background at the undergraduate level—done in Mexico—was painting and art history, a passion I am trying to keep alive. In graduate school, I was trained as a specialist in Montague semantics, which made use of modal logic to analyze natural language phenomena. Then I got interested in the application of this approach to natural language processing (so-called computational linguistics and its application to AI and expert systems). My dissertation in 1987 dealt with ways of processing English queries to access a relational database. I also wrote papers on semantic issues associated with tense, aspect, and modality.

After arriving at Pitt in 1987, my focus shifted to Japanese language pedagogy, especially issues relating to teaching reading in Japanese. Using my skills in computational linguistics, I obtained grants to produce computer-based language software for teaching reading in Japanese (Understanding Written Japanese I and II). I edited one book on the current research in teaching Japanese as a second language and coauthored a book with Mari Noda (OSU) on reading instruction.

More recently, I cultivated an interest in 20th-century Japanese intellectual history—a field that speaks to my interest in philosophy. A book on Japanese philosopher Kuki Shuuzoo will be out in 2003.

My current research interests in semantics are numerous. They include an examination of the mechanism through which aspectual information in the verb percolates up to the sentential level, a study of event structure, a better understanding of the process of grammaticalization in Japanese and other languages, and a study of tense alternation in Japanese connected texts, just to name a few that are lurking around in the desk drawer.

Current Courses: Fall 2004

0003 Second Year Japanese 1

1023 Aspects of the Japanese Language

Publications

	Interactive Japanese: Understanding Written Japanese. Alpine, CA: The CALL Educational Project. 1992.
	Advances in Japanese Language Pedagogy, editor. Columbus, OH: National East Asian Languages Resource Center. 2002.
	Acts of Reading: Exploring Connections in Pedagogy of Japanese, with Mari Noda. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 2002.

The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shuzo, Honolulu:University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. .

Inexorable Modernity: Japan's Grappling with Modernity in the Arts, Lanham, Maryland, Lexington Books, 2007.

Yoshida Shigeru: The Last Meiji Man, Boulder, Colorado: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

Fun Stuff

Recipes