El español y el japonés by Noritaka Fukushima (review)

El español y el japonés(Monograph Series in Foreign Studies No. 53) is a compilation of several articles previously published and papers presented in conferences by the author. The book is made up of two parts accompanied by a short prologue.

Chapter 1 of “Primera parte: El modo y la modalidad” presents a descriptive summary of various studies on modality, some on Japanese alone, others on Spanish alone, and a few contrasting Spanish and Japanese. Through the discussion, the author explains how mood distinction in Spanish (i.e., the indicative and subjunctive) is correlated with modality. He concludes that studying Japanese modality helps to understand Spanish modality and vice versa. Unfortunately, all studies reviewed are very succinct, possibly due to a space constraint, and some parts are difficult to understand. The inclusion of more illustrative examples may have resolved this issue.

Chapter 2 is a descriptive summary of how mood (particularly the subjunctive) has been defined and treated over the years in different publications of Real Academia Española from 1771 through 2011. Although the summary is very informative, the author does not contribute his own analysis or perspective on the topic.

Chapter 3 is a descriptive summary of Japanese grammar written by Iberian missionaries in Japan from seventeenth to twentieth centuries, focusing on what Japanese expressions can be considered equivalent to Spanish mood. Since most studies reviewed here deal with medieval Japanese and Portuguese (or Latin), the arguments may be difficult to follow for those readers who are only familiar with Spanish.

Chapter 4 presents a corpus study of dialectal mood variation in questions embedded under the matrix verb creer‘to believe’ (affirmative and negative). The author uses data extracted from Real Academia Española’s online corpora CREA(modern Spanish data base) and Corde (diachronic data base). On the basis of 2,284 tokens, he shows that the occurrence of the subjunctive in the context at issue is much higher in Latin American Spanish than in European Spanish. He follows up his corpus study with a survey using three native speakers. He concludes that the neutral modal area (between affirmative and negative) is occupied by the subjunctive in America, whereas it is occupied by indicative in Spain. This section is rich with empirical data, and the results and the hypothesis presented shed new light on dialectal variation. Nonetheless, there are methodological weaknesses with the study. First, no statistics are employed to support the analysis. Second, the sample size for the experimental study (judgment from one native speaker from Spain, Chile, and Peru each) is too small to make any kind of claim on dialectal variation.

Chapter 5 discusses some pedagogical issues involved in teaching the subjunctive to second language learners. Although the author intends to focus on Japanese native speakers learning Spanish, his discussion is general enough to be applicable to any population. The author mentions that Japanese native speakers may face problems of a different nature than English native speakers, but unfortunately does not elaborate further.

In the “Segunda parte: Diversos aspectos en contraste,” chapter 6 deals with how the notion of theme (also called topic in the literature on Information Structure), marked by the particle -wain Japanese, may be expressed in Spanish. This is the only chapter in the book in which the author actually attempts to contrast Japanese and Spanish, probing one of the fundamental differences between “Japanese-type” languages and “Spanish-type” languages. The chapter is well researched and rich with naturally occurring data. Unfortunately, the chapter may be difficult to follow without a background in Information Structure, which pertains to the field of discourse pragmatics. The reading would have been much easier and beneficial to language teachers or linguists not familiar with syntax-pragmatics interface if the author had explained some fundamental concepts of Information Structure: discourse referents, topic, different kinds of focus, etc. The reader interested in pursuing the topic would also have benefitted from the inclusion of...