In order to seek ways of making better use of Japanimations in EFL lessons, this paper analyzes basic word statistics of six English-dubbed Japanese animation movies made by Hayao Miyazaki in comparison with the same number of American animations originally made in English. The results obtained are as follows: (1) There is a significant difference between the translated Japanese animations and their American counterparts in Tokens, Types and TTR, which shows the marked tendency that the translations from Japanese animations consist of less words, comprise a narrower variety of words, and have lower lexical density than the American movies; (2) Regarding the frequency distribution of words, a striking characteristic common to all the six Japanimations is that the proportion of the words appearing only once in a movie is significantly lower while that of the words repeated more than six times is higher. It is concluded, therefore, that Japanimations are considered well-suited as teaching materials especially for students to introduce themselves into learning English through movies.

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Metonymy, one of the most basic cognitive systems of the human being, is a device for referring one thing to another. It contributes not only to rhetorical expressions but to some linguistic phenomena such as polysemy and meaning extension that have a productive mechanism. The purpose of this paper is to understand the linguistic mechanism. First, I will report my examination of various metonymical expressions obtained from four English language films within the framework of the Generative Lexicon devised by James Pustejovsky. Secondly, as a result of the examination, seven models linking between the lexicon and pragmatics in those expressions will be proposed and illustrated. This may clarify the mechanisms whereby the metonymical expressions acquire disambiguous meaning and help us understand the metonymical phrases appearing in English screenplays more easily. Finally, a new way of discussing the stylistics of the screenplays wifi be suggested. The significance of this study is that both context and lexicon have been discussed on the same plane, which allows, in general, for a more inclusive understanding of metonymy in English and, more specifically, of English language screenplays.

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There is a wide agreement that cultural differences should be dealt with in the EFL classroom for the sake of those learners already immersed in a high context culture such as Japan or Korea. Based on that sociolinguistic perspective, many culturally diverse (non)linguistic phenomena are taught in class. However, is this teaching effective in enhancing learners pragmatic competence? How well do they infer the implicated meaning behind common expressions, such as greetings, apologies, declining, and so on? Do they pay attention to both the literal meaning and the implicated meaning? The purpose of this paper is to examine whether or not there is a relationship between learners English proficiency and inference accuracy. Subjects of this study were 90 Japanese university EFL learners from three different classes. The material adapted for research was a movie scene that included 'phatic communion. The results of the research indicated that there is no relationship between English proficiency and inference accuracy, in other words, extensive knowledge obtained in a classroom does not necessarily include advanced skills in inferring the implicature such as politeness.

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This study compares the data contained in English subtitles with those contained in English dubbing in the Japanese film Hauru No Ugoku Shiro (Howl's Moving Castle) in terms of the information pressure and Preferred Argument Structure (PAS). Although the English subtitles and dubbing are distinct from each other in word choice and sentence structure, it is clear that they share the natural referent distribution observed in previous studies on PAS. The last section presents two prospective ways in which English subtitles and dubbing in a Japanese film can be used to impart English teaching.

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