Traditionally, linguistic research has focused on the Indo-European language family - particularly English - and languages like Japanese and Chinese have not been pursued in theoretical developments. However, once scholars started to pay more attention to Japanese, its similarities to and differences from Indo-European languages not only revealed a great deal of typological variation, but also helped to provide a more accurate picture of the fundamental properties of human language.

For the past four decades, linguistic research on the Japanese language has made remarkable progress, contributing to the intellectual and scientific exploration of the linguistic and cognitive sciences, synchronic and diachronic sociocultural developments, and to the humanities more generally.
This three-volume collection, compiled of published articles that are considered seminal in the development of Japanese linguistic research, represents a variety of formal and functional approaches to a broad range of areas of linguistics. The collection also includes articles from journals and chapters taken from monographs and edited volumes.