Towards Corpus-Based Creation of Lexical Syllabus

Collocations between Suppositional Adverbs and Clause-Final Modality Forms

Abstract

Lexical or grammatical syllabi for Japanese language learners have mainly been created drawing on the intuition and experience of teachers and editors. Information concerning the collocations between words or words and grammatical patterns has largely been neglected. In this paper, we propose the usage of corpora within Japanese language education by exploring the possibilities and appropriateness of creating Japanese language lexical syllabus based on various kinds of Japanese language corpora. We concentrate on a set of suppositional adverbs and clause-final modality forms, exploring their collocational behaviors across various types of corpora, and based on analyses of frequency and salience within the corpora, we propose improvements to the coverage of lexical or collocational items within existing Japanese language syllabi. Additionally, we differentiate between the various corpora according to adverb distributions, and based on those analysis results, we discuss the relation between learning goals and corpus type, as well as the relation between introduction order for items within a syllabus and item frequency within the relevant corpora.