Toritate refers to the function of focusing a word, phrase, or clause, indicating, “this is all there is” or “everything else is different” or of defocusing to indicate, “this is not all there is” or “there are also others that are the same”. Japanese can be considered a language in which toritate is particularly well developed and can express various sorts of meanings.  For instance, toritate expressions such as gurai expressing restriction and wa expressing contrasting are commonly used in Japanese but are not used much in other languages.
The study of Japanese troitate expressions has become popular relatively recently. Similarly, researches on toritate expressions of other languages are not popular yet.
In this project, researchers in Japanese and other languages collaborate to conduct contrasting studies between Japanese and other languages, in order to greatly advance the study of toritate expressions of languages other than Japanese, and deepen the study of Japanese toritate expressions from a wide perspective.

Subproject Leader

Hisashi Noda（Professor, Division of Theory and Typology, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics）