About Yoichiro Hasebe
Although my birthplace is Takamatsu, I spent most of my childhood in Osaka, where my family moved right after I was born. When I was in high school, we moved to Nara, from where I had to take a long train ride to school in Osaka every day. After graduating from high school, I went to Doshisha University in Kyoto. Two campuses of Doshisha, as you probably know, are not too far away from Nara to commute to. Still, I had to spend much time on trains as an undergraduate and graduate student. It was, however, a blessing in disguise. Since there was little I could do on the crowded train but read books, I read a lot on my way to and from school, which I was not very fond of at first. The more I got used to it, though, the more comfortable I became with it, and the more I desired to study.
I am not a person with a natural inclination to study. I have gotten myself stuck on a number of things that have little or nothing to do with my academic career as a researcher of linguistics. In my childhood, for example, drawing cartoon pictures, or manga, was one of my great interests. As a teenager, I discovered the joy of playing rock music. I played the electric guitar, and I liked playing so much that I began to believe that nothing but plucking those six strings was worth doing. Later, with the advent of the Internet, I became fascinated with the idea of being able to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. I, therefore, got into computer programming. (By the way, computer programming is the only thing among all the other stuff listed above that I still constantly do and enjoy.)
Yes, my past and present interests may seem completely irrelevant to each other, let alone to research in linguistics. But I see an important commonality among them. Drawing pictures (even childish scribbles), playing music (no matter how miserably), and writing a computer program (which usually turns out to be yet another reinvention of the wheel) all involve the expression of ideas. I think it was to the ways in which one can give form to thoughts, intentions, and feelings that I have been, and remain, strongly attracted. Considering that language is our primary means of expressing thoughts, intentions, and feelings, my working as a researcher of linguistics may simply be a natural consequence of the inclinations that have guided me to this day. And I suppose that is why I feel as much excitement reading papers on linguistics as I feel when I draw pictures, play music, and work on computers.
Please feel free to come by my office to check out what I am currently working on or just to talk!
Research
My main areas of interest are the following:
1) Elucidating the cognitive process when one utters a nominal expression.
I believe that our fundamental way of perceiving the world is object-oriented. Almost anything can be conceived of as an object with a variety of properties and various degrees of prototypicality. Now it is reasonably hoped that we can take a glance at the workings of the mind by studying how we construct nominal forms in our native languages.
2) Explaining the astonishingly interesting similarities between cognitive linguistics and the philosophy behind contemporary computer programming languages.
Since software is one of the most important forces driving modern society, the theory of survival of the fittest also applies to the methodologies of computer programming. Computer languages are constantly being improved, occasionally through large-scale innovations. This being so, computer programming, the science of turning human intentions into computationally executable forms, must have enormous implications for linguistics, the science of how we express ideas for other human beings.