Dr Kousuke Kaita

Kousuke Kaita specialises in English linguistics, the history of English, and Germanic philology. His current research interests include exhortative speech structures in Germanic languages: how the addressor proposes the addressee(s) to take certain desirable actions. Particular focus is on how Christian stories, such as Judgement Day or the Lord’s Prayer, are intertwined to create effective exhortative speeches.

Kaita’s research began with the development of auxiliary verbs. In his PhD dissertation, Kaita (2015) argued that English auxiliaries expressing obligation ought to, should, and must have different syntactic and semantic origins in Old and Middle English. The study also found that they co-occur with adhortative expressions meaning ‘let us’. This outcome led to a second project on the development of adhortative and causative expressions, as Modern English let us has been derived from let.

The Faculty of English, Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC), and St Catharine’s College in 2023 supported his study in Cambridge. In 2024, he is a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics (MMLL), German Section. The scope of his research encompasses the role of appeal, vocabulary, and themes common to Christianity: how certain adverbs, formulaic expressions as well as the aforementioned religious stories work for persuasive speeches. His current research aims to determine how these linguistic and textual materials are presented in Germanic texts. It is hoped that this research will provide insights into communicative approaches to medieval literature.

Kaita completed his bachelor’s (2005) and master’s (2007) degrees in Japan and his PhD at the University of Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), Germany. Since 2018, he has been affiliated with Meiji University in Japan, teaching the English language.