Dr Nicolas Tranter

BA, PhD (Sheffield)

    tranter photo

    Email: n.tranter@shef.ac.uk

      Current Research Projects

      Nicolas Tranter's interest lies in the area of comparative, contrastive and contact/historical linguistics of East Asia, considering both changes in the phonology, grammar and script of individual languages and the nature and effects of contact between the major and minor languages of the region. Recent work has included research into the borrowing of words into Korean from English or via Japanese, and the nature of linguistic borrowing in the modern world.

      Another current major area of research is the nature and development of logographic (i.e. character-based) and phonographic (i.e. alphabetical or syllabic) scripts in the region in a broader cross-linguistic context. He is analysing and comparing the internal structure of Chinese character script as it is used synchronically with that of Egyptian and Sumerian scripts, as well as how the internal structure changes through script simplification policies in China or through the adaptation of the script to other languages, such as Japanese, Vietnamese or Zhuang.

      Despite a multilingual/cross-linguistic emphasis to Nicolas Tranter's research, he is also interested in the grammar of his major East Asian language, modern Japanese.

      Dr. Tranter is currently editing a volume 'The Languages of Japan and Korea' for Routledge's Language Families series.

        Research Supervision

        Nicolas Tranter supervises Ph.D. theses on East Asian linguistics, and welcomes applications to carry out postgraduate research on comparative, contrastive or contact/historical linguistics issues in East Asia or the syntax of Modern or Classical Japanese.


        Ph.D. Theses Supervised

        Paul Woods, 'Corpus-Based Investigation of Noun Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese' (co-supervisor; student registered in Computer Science; Ph.D. degree awarded 1997).

        Kathryn Allen, 'The Theory of Foreign Language Learning Strategies Applied to the Learning of the Japanese Script in UK Universities' (Ph.D. degree awarded 2000).

        Simon Forth, 'Sociolinguistic phenomena associated with loan-words in Japanese' (Ph.D. degree awarded 2006).

        Mark Irwin, 'The development of the moraic /Q/ in morpheme-final /-ki/ + morpheme-initial /k-/ in Sino-Japanese compounds' (Ph.D. degree awarded 2006).

          List of Major Publications

          'Modern Japanese' (Forthcoming), in Nicolas Tranter (ed.) The Languages of Japan and Korea (London: Routledge).

          'Graphic loans: East Asia and beyond' (Forthcoming in 2008), WORD 58.

          'Non-conventional script choice in Japan' (2008) International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192: 133-151.

          'The "ideal square" of logographic scripts and the structural similarities of Khitan script and han'gul' (2002), in Sang-oak Lee, Gregory K. Iverson, with Sang-cheol Ahn and Young-mee Yu Cho (eds.) Pathways into Korean Language and Culture: Essays in Honor of Young-key Kim-Renaud (Seoul: Pagijong Press), 503-522.

          'The Asukaike word-list slat and pre-Sino-Japanese phonology' (2001), 143-160 in Thomas McAuley (ed.) Language Change in East Asia, London: Curzon Press.

          'The phonology of English loan-words in Korean' (2000), Word.

          'Script "borrowing", cultural influence and the development of the written vernacular in East Asia' (December 2000), in T.E. McAuley (ed.) Language Change in East Asia (London: Curzon Press), 180-204.

          'Hybrid Anglo-Japanese loanwords in Korean' (1997) Linguistics 35: 133-166.

          'Classifiers: cutting up the world in East Asian languages' (1996), SEAS EARC Research Papers in East Asian Studies.

            Japanese for 'School of East Asian Studies'