The origin of modern linguistics lies in modern philosophy. Saussurean linguistics was influenced by the philosophical theory of perception, which in turn inspired linguistic relativity as represented by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as opposed to the linguistic universalism advocated by Chomsky. This paper demonstrates that both positions confuse perception with meaning. While what is perceived is intrinsically individualistic, meaning only comes into existence when several individuals are grouped into a category by generalization. One of the fundamental issues concerning language is the sharing of meaning, although meaning is essentially arbitrary. This paper argues that the sharing of meaning is motivated by our desire to co-operate with others, since it is only when we do this that the need to share our intentions comes into play. This desire, supported by the pleasure of sharing the results of co-operation, is exactly what distinguishes human beings from higher primates such as chimpanzees.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the foundations of various linguistic categorizations and to discuss how to justify categories based on meaning. Although linguistics is generally considered to be a science, not all categories proposed in the literature can meet the scientific requirements for categorization, according to which categories must be identified through some verifiable operations and defined by invariant results. This is especially the case with categories based on meaning, although they are indispensable for linguistic research. What, then, ensures the validity of semantic categories such as verb classes? This paper claims that such categories are justified insofar as (1) the motivation for the categorization is shared by linguists and (2) the categories can provide a better explanation for a wide range of linguistic phenomena, beyond those that motivated the categorization in the first place.

The cognitive claim that language is a reflection of our recognition of the world raises the two following issues: (i) What exactly do we recognize? (ii) Who exactly recognizes the world? Although cognitive linguistics assumes the dualism of outer and inner worlds, i.e. objective and mentally constructed worlds, their arguments fail to follow their assumption. What they claim to be the facts about the world often turns out to be nothing but reflections of our construal of the world. Their argument can then be reformulated in terms of monism. The claim that language is a reflection of our recognition of the world is also at odds with contrastive linguistics. In this framework, differences between languages should be accounted for in terms of differences of the native speakers’ recognition of the world, which often leads to the notion of “meaning independent of speakers’ recognition”, contrary to what is assumed by cognitive linguistics.

Sayula Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken in southeastern Mexico, exhibits an inverse system. Inversion is a grammatical phenomenon in which the topicality ranking of participants and their corresponding argument types determine the choice between direct and inverse constructions. The principal motivation for this contrast is deictic, which is represented by an SAP (speech act participant) > 3 hierarchy. Inversion is so pervasive in this language that all polyvalent verbs are involved. Morphosyntactically, there are three subsystems corresponding to three different participant-configurations: SAP/non-SAP, intra-SAP, and extra-SAP. Extra-SAP configuration involves another mechanism called obviation to rank participants. This paper aims to provide a descriptive sketch of the morphosyntax of Sayula Popoluca’s inverse system and locate it within the typology of inversion.

Nishimura (2003, 2006) pointed out that in Japanese loanwords, voiced obstruent geminates can optionally devoice when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent (e.g. /doggu/ → [dokku] ‘dog’). This devoicing pattern has been analyzed within a number of theoretical frameworks, and has thereby contributed to address several theoretical issues. The pattern, moreover, has been studied in several experimental, judgment-based studies. However, there are only a few studies on actual production data. Furthermore, all of the previous studies have generally assumed that the devoicing pattern under question is a sociolinguistically monolithic phenomenon. This paper addresses these two issues. By studying the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (Kokuritsu-Kokugo-Kenkyuujo 2008), we first confirm the previous claim that the OCP makes devoicing of geminates more likely in actual production data. Moreover, the results also reveal that many external, sociolinguistic factors affect the applicability of devoicing. The overall results thus contribute to the deeper understanding of the phenomenon by revealing various hitherto unnoticed factors that affect the applicability of devoicing.