“”Why is it that you are interested in my talk on Japanese?” “Well, I’m a specialist on extraterrestrial communication!” — This was actually a piece of conversation between me and a member of the audience after the presentation of my paper on Japanese at the Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Dresden, 1999. I am not sure if my conversational partner found his curiosity fully satisfied with my talk, but I can assure you (especially if you are interested in typological considerations) that Japanese is a really fascinating language in order to have a balanced view of what a human language can be like. You don’t have to go for little known “alien” and “exotic” languages (where you often find the descriptions available not up to your expectations — understandably because of the extreme difficulty on the part of the researcher to fully and sufficiently familiarize him-/herself with what is going on in the minds of the native speakers). In the present volume, you find a group of professionally well-trained linguists (mostly, native speakers of Japanese) being engaged with a number of crucial (and perhaps some even apparently peculiar) features of the Japanese language. Their discussions and presentations are mildly in the framework of cognitive linguistics and thus fully accessible and serviceable for anyone interested in seeing how human languages can look like.”

“This volume makes an ideal supplementary reading for courses on the structure of Japanese and is of interest to those broadly concerned with Japanese culture and society, as well as those specialized in cross-cultural communication.”