Although Japanese has been lagging behind the other major languages of the world in the utilization of electronic corpora in linguistic studies, the situation is changing rapidly due to several factors including, notably, the ongoing construction of a balanced corpus of the language at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics.

This paper focuses on collocation, a linguistic phenomenon which can be analyzed reliably only by using large corpora, and explores the possible roles which corpora may play in the compilation of a dictionary of Japanese, be it a dictionary of an ordinary kind or a collocational dictionary. The three collocational aspects of Japanese examined by way of corpus analysis are: 1) the concept of ‘circumcollocate’, 2) the degree of markedness of verbs and adjectives, and 3) the semantic differences between synonymous idiomatic grammatical phrases. The paper will demonstrate the ways in which corpora may have lexicographic significance in each of those domains.

A large corpus is required for the retrieval of collocational information. The paper uses a Web corpus, constructed by the author in 2008, which consists of approximately 75 billion characters. This is equivalent to 150 gigabytes in file size, or three to four hundred thousand Japanese novel books of average size.

This paper introduces the collaborative corpus-based research project Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese. As part of the project, we are developing a corpus of pre-modern Japanese texts which is encoded with grammatical, and in particular syntactic, information and we here present two pilot studies based on the corpus, concerning verb-verb (V1-V2) compounds in Old Japanese (8th century). We first focus on V2s, with a view to understanding what properties are characteristic of the loosely defined class of ‘auxiliary verbs’ (hojodōshi補助動詞). We apply a number of tests to compounds, including for lexical integrity and transitivity harmony, and thereby identify a number of V2s that can take part in ‘non-lexical compounds’ (compounds relatively unconstrained by the semantics of their component verbs), as well as some distributional and combinatory patterns typical of non-lexical compounds. Second, we examine a single high-frequency verb, omop- ‘think, feel’, in order to examine its argument-taking properties when used as a predicate alone and when used as a V1 in a compound. We identify interesting differences, in particular finding that omop-V2 compounds are less likely to take clausal complements than when omop- is used as a predicate on its own.*

  This article discusses the current usages and meanings of terror as well as changes over time, particularly in the past few decades. In recent news articles, the word terror is often used to refer to attacks by international terrorist groups whose main purpose is to create chaos. Derived from the original meaning of “intense fear,” terror has gone through various changes before coming to be used as a synonym of terrorism. These changes are described, based on newspaper archives and corpora as well as dictionary definitions and citations. Starting as an abstract noun, over time the word came to have a more concrete meaning, “the action of causing dread,” and then became more specifically political in its sense when it was used in contexts such as “reign of terror.” Later, the focus of the act shifted from governmental to agitational, from personal to organizational, and from domestic to international. It is pointed out that these shifts can be observed especially clearly after the start of the “Global War on Terror” promoted by the Bush administration. Corpus analyses of the collocations, grammar patterns, and synonyms of terror show clearly that the word is becoming closer in usage and meaning to terrorism and nearly interchangeable with it.

Abstract: In recent years, corpus phonetics has become a rapidly expanding field. However, the lack of appropriate tools for automatic acoustic analysis hinders further development of the field. In this paper, we present a methodological study on the automatic extraction of vowel formants using both robust linear predictive coding (RLPC; Lee, 1988) and dynamic formant tracking (Talkin, 1987). Acoustic data were taken from the Buckeye corpus of English conversations. We varied two aspects of the analysis—preemphasis and LPC order—to optimize formant tracking results by speaker and vowel. We also show, based on the optimal results, the distribution of ten English vowels in the F1/F2 space in conversational speech.*

This paper argues that what are traditionally called “qualitative adjectives” in Koryak (the Chukchi-Kamchatkan language family) essentially correspond to the property predication type proposed by the newly developed predication typology in the field of Japanese linguistics. The argument is based on two observations. First, the form can be derived not only from adjective stems but also from other word class stems, including verbal stems. Second, the form shows antipassivization or violations of the general structural constraint of this language, such as intransitive conjugation of transitive stems or promotion of oblique nouns to the absolutive case; all of these are morphological and syntactic manifestations of topicalization.

  Further, a property-predication-type sentence is mutually convertible with its corresponding event-predication-type sentence; this is a strategy aimed at reducing the constraints of temporal stability inherent in each word class. A language such as Koryak, which recognizes the difference between property predication and event predication with both morphologically and syntactically clear forms, has hitherto not been discussed in the field of languages worldwide. Thus, this paper suggests a possibility for broadening the perspective of the new predication typology.

This paper aims at presenting the popular forms of the basic conditional sentences of Hassaniya (the Mauritanian dialect of Arabic). Cohen (1960) presents three groups of conjunctions introducing the protasis clause of a conditional sentence: (a) mneyn (b) iida or iila and (c) luu/iluu. He adds that (a) or (b) is used in a sentence with a realizable condition, whereas (c) is used in a sentence with an unrealizable one. However, a survey the author recently conducted in Nouakchott did not find any examples of a conditional sentence in which iida or luu/iluu was used. Instead, it was observed that ile is used very widely in conditional sentences both with realizable conditions and with unrealizable ones, and that ileyn is also frequently used, in addition to ile, in conditional sentences with realizable conditions involving present or future phenomena. This paper also attempts to find a Merkmal or Merkmals to distinguish between ile (an ile-conditional sentence) and ileyn (an ileyn-conditional sentence) from four points of view: the degree of conditionality, the speaker’s psychological position toward the conditionality, the binding-degree of protasis to apodosis, and the degree of selectivity in the condition.