While the role of script mixture as an effective means of providing segmentation cues to readers of Japanese is commonly addressed with reference to the modern writing system, the situation in premodern times is largely understudied, and an overview is still lacking. This is by no means due to a lack of strategies to provide segmentation cues in earlier forms of written Japanese, which included but were not limited to script mixture. In fact, a large variety of further strategies is attested, be it in either of the realms of hiragana or katakana, or in times prior to the development of visually distinct phonograms. Depending on the respective time and intellectual background, the means identified in this paper as a first attempt at an overview relate to different kinds of linguistic boundaries, for instance between constituents, words, or morphemes. As reflections of linguistic awareness, both on the part of native speakers of Japanese and of non-native observers, they thus offer us valuable glimpses at forms of linguistic analysis that were for the most part never made explicit.

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The epistemological space of the contemporary globalized linguistic academia is, without a doubt, heavily dominated by a Western-centred perspective, which provides the reference frame of categories, concepts, and theories, and which positions itself as the point of origin of comparative and generalizing discourse. Within this context, it is important to reassess the importance of alternative, non-Western linguistic traditions and to allow their methods, concepts, and achievements to contribute more inclusively to the advancement of globalized linguistics in a cumulative fashion. With its rich tradition of philological and linguistic thought, Japan is an ideal pole for such a decentred perspective. As a defence and illustration of the heuristic power of the approach advocated here, this paper presents three issues drawn from the phonological and morphophonological subfields – the mora and syllable, rendaku, and the use of the meta-term akusento (‘accent’) – to show how not only empirical data drawn from the Japanese language but also theories, notions, and perspectives developed within the Japanese approaches to language and linguistics can help achieve the decentring and reflexive enterprise that is arguably required in contemporary academia.

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The present study addresses the issue of whether the inclusive and exclusive “we” are equals in the firstperson plural category, an issue which has drawn considerable attention in the typology literature. In fact, there is an ongoing theoretical debate as to whether the inclusive is a first-person pronoun in the first place (e.g., Moskal 2018; Daniel 2005). This paper examines 22 Ryukyuan languages with clusivity opposition from two perspectives. First, it looks at the same and different coding of the pronominal stems of first-person singular (1SG), exclusive (EXCL), and inclusive (INCL) with the assumption that the pronominal stem is a primary indicator of the person feature. It will be shown that all the attested patterns consistently treat EXCL and INCL differently, with a special morphological coding choice, if any, always assigned to INCL, confirming the typological claim that EXCL and INCL are not equals in the personal-pronominal paradigm. The second perspective concerns a common view that INCL is a marked firstperson pronoun with features combining those of first person and those of second person. By a comparison of EXCL, INCL, and 2nd person plural (2PL), it will be shown that such a formulation of INCL is problematic, calling into question the view that INCL is a marked first-person category. The conclusion thus favors the view suggested by Daniel (2005) and Cysouw (2003), who argue that INCL constitutes a distinct person category.

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