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You can e-mail me at: hoji [at] usc.edu
Mailing address
Department of Linguistics
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California 90089-1693
U.S.A.
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Research Interests
　
3/24/2023
Language Faculty Science seeks to find out about the initial state of the language faculty by the basic scientific method, i.e., via disconfirmable universal predictions, deduction of those predictions by means of a minimal number of theoretical concepts, and the pursuit of exceptionless replication, with an ultimate aim at universal reproducibility.

I have been engaged in Language Faculty Science (LFS) research, where we aspire to deduce definite predictions about an individual (speaker) (more precisely, about his/her judgments on the (im)possibility of the pairing of a sequence of sounds (such as corresponding to a sentence) and a meaning, and obtaining definite experimental results about that individual in line with the prediction, and replicate said results in/with any other speaker, regardless of their "languages", hence truly looking into the universal aspects of the language faculty in a definite manner. Crucially, definite judgments (to be replicated universally) are not definite judgments on a particular sentence (or even sentences of a particular schema/pattern) in a particular language; it is about correlations of judgments. It is by pursuing definite correlational patterns of judgments that we can hope to accumulate knowledge about the language faculty by the basic scientific method. In The Theory and Practice of Language Faculty Science (De Gruyter Mouton, edited by Hajime Hoji, Daniel Plesniak and Yukinori Takubo), published in November 2022 (copyrighted 2023), we present and motivate the basic tenets of our current approach to LFS and both explain and demonstrate how they can be executed and implemented. The Mouton volume is in effect a sequel to my Language Faculty Science (Cambridge University Press, 2015), with the most significant features of the latter including its focus on individuals, adoption of the correlational methodology, and its success (so far) with 100% accuracy. We continue to conduct large-scale non-researcher-informant experiments in the terms of Hoji 2015; we do so, not as a crucial experiment, but as a replicational demonstration of results of the self-experiment. Although we have obtained results as predicted, again with 100% accuracy so far, dealing with Japanese, English, Korean and Mandarin Chinese in such attempts, further scientific discoveries are sought in further self-experiments (experiments that researcher conducts on him/herself) and in-depth non-self-experiments quite close to the self-experiments, where we can expand empirical coverage, exploring consequences of various theoretical and conceptual innovations.