In Tohoku University, the Graduate School of Information Sciences (GSIS) was established in April, 1993 with the goal of promoting interdisciplinary research and education in both the fundamentals and frontiers of the information sciences. Interdisciplinary research necessarily requires diverse variation of academic backgrounds among the staff, which is a notable feature of this Graduate School: its staff members' abilities are grounded in mathematics, computer sciences, mechanical engineering, biology, civil engineering, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, and economics.
GSIS consists of four departments: Computer and Mathematical Sciences, System Information Sciences, Human-Social Information Sciences, and Applied Information Sciences. Students must pass the entrance examination of one discipline of their choice, and the English proficiency test. Foreign students are required to take a qualifying examination of Japanese proficiency as well. Upon admission to the GSIS, students are free to pursue research in any discipline. GSIS is also open to a limited number of students who are employed full time, allowing them to follow Master's or Doctoral courses while keeping their positions.
Please refer to this website for the specific details.

The staff and students of this Department aim at solving important and urgent problems that confront present and future societies from the environment, cities, population, resources, and energy. Toward that goal, the Department encourages interdisciplinary studies among human sciences, social sciences, and civil engineering, thereby evolving new methodologies of synthesizing multi-aspectual information related to human-social systems. The following research topics are particularly emphasized: concepts and theories of information and communication; individual, social, political and economic functions and impacts of information and communication.
Please refer to this website for the specific details.

We aim at explicating how the human linguistic competence has been acquired and used, specifically using generative syntax as the tool for study. Carefully observing empirical data from various individual languages, we study what the universal aspects of language are, how a language can change diachronically and vary synchronically, and how it is acquired, in terms of syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics.
We cannot see the human linguistic competence or the I-language (internal, individual, and intensional language) directly, so that introspective judgment by an individual native speaker of a language has commonly been used for the study of the I-language. In the progress of the information and communication technology (ICT), however, we have been recognizing that the extent of dialectal and idiolectal microvariations within a single language is so large and the speed of phonological, semantic, morphological and even syntactic changes within a single language is so fast that the study of an I-language through an inspection of the introspective judgment of an individual speaker is too inaccurate and unstable to construct a reliable theory of I-language.
Fortunately, the advent of the Internet has enabled linguists to release a large number of electric corpora across the world, which has enabled us to study the synchronic state of the knowledge of a large number of individual language users as well as how a language can change diachronically in a more microparametric and fine-grained way than was available before we are familiar with the Internet. Thus, we are now in a position to study the nature of I-language by means of ICTs, such as electric corpora, a large-scale experiment of introspective judgment of acceptability, and statistics. Combining these new ways of language study with the traditional ways to uncover the nature of I-language by means of scientific theories of language will bring us a fruitful result about our understanding of the potentially universal and unchangeable aspects of the various I-languages across the world as a biological endowment of human evolution, as well as the variable, changeable and microparametric nature of the E-language spoken by a small group of specific language users by their contact and interaction with a neighboring group of the speaker of the same language or languages.
We aim at a sustainable new style of theoretical linguistics that is obtained by combining the traditional (theoretical and descriptive) linguistics and ICT / corpos linguistics. Among others, our special emphasis is on morphosyntax, lexical semantics, diachronic syntax, comparative syntax and psycholinguistics. Please refer to this website for the specific details.

Our lab, like all the other labs, is composed of the Master Course and the Doctor Course. In our lab, more than 40 students have completed their MA thesis, and more than 20 students have completed their Ph.D. thesis in the last 30 years.
Those who completed their MA thesis can get a teacher’s license for English with which they are qualified to apply for a teacher recruitment examination at a high school or a junior high school.
Most of the graduates who completed their Ph.D. aim for an academic researcher (and professor) at a university/college.

Katsuragawa, H. (2006)

The Syntax and Semantics of Aspectuality and Related Issues

Suzuki, H. (2006)

Word Order Variation and Determinants in Old English

Honma, Y. (2007)

A Cognitive-Linguistic Approach to Noun Complement Selection in English and Japanese

Sugawara, T. (2008)

Lexical Conceptual Structure and Qualia Structure in Verbal and Nominal Semantics in English

Suzuki, H. (2008)

「様態性」と「状況性」に視点を置く副詞配列の分析
ーー機能階層領域内における英語副詞の統語的生起実態と意味的連続性ーー

Mimura, T. (2009)

A Unified Leftward Ā-movement Analysis of Focus Constructions in English and Japanese

Inoi, S. (2009)

A Discourse Analysis of Japanese EFL Learners’ Production of Referential Expressions in Written English Narratives

Ishiyama, T. (2012)

A Study of Phases and Its Applications

Konno, M. (2013)

A Descriptive Study of Inverted Usages of Direct Quotation in English

Kosuge, T. (2016)

A Diachronic Syntax of Complex Predicate and Case Conversion in Japanese

Yi, L. (2025)

Grammaticalization of Verbs in Mandarin Chinese: An Analysis in terms of Cartography and Upward Reanalysis

• Admission Guidelines
• Past entrance exam questions / Intent of the questions
• Research students

For the students at Tohoku University and/or at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, there are a number of financial supports for continuing their study at the graduate school and/or scholarships for foreign students.

• Pioneering Research Support Project for PhD Students
• Scholarship for International Student