Abstract
This study analyzed a corpus of four anime scripts regarding 1) the coverage of grammatical items at each level of the former criteria for proficiency test and 2) what and how grammatical items are used at each level. In all scripts, the coverage of items at old level 1 was less than 10%, while that at old levels 3 and 4 was over 80%. Taking the usage of “V-tai” as an example, only about 30% of the usage fell within the scope of old level 4, and most such instances co-occurred with items at old level 3. Furthermore, the results suggest that the use of grammatical items is influenced by the content and characters of the anime.
