This paper attempts to compare the differences of transitive sentences with inanimate subjects such as “The key opened the door.” between Japanese and Chinese by theory of collocation. After using correspondence analysis to evaluate example sentences gathered from corpus of Japanese and Chinese, it was found that ‘recursiveness’ and ‘affectedness’ of verbs are the common factors in transitive sentences with inanimate subjects between Japanese and Chinese (confining nouns marked by accusative case to tangible things). What kind of collocation a verb makes with a noun is deeply involved with the character of the noun. For example, the type of natural nouns (autonomy), such as “wind”, makes collocations with verbs which have strong affectedness to weak ones. By contrast, the type of plant nouns (autonomy), such as “tree”, makes collocations only with verbs which have recursiveness. Finally, the most important difference between the two languages is that some types of nouns such as the natural ones (autonomy) make a large number of collocations with verbs of productivity like “The wind makes sounds.” in Japanese, but this kind of collocations made by the same type of nouns rarely appear in Chinese.

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This article provides an improved method of calculating productivity index in order to calculate the productivity of each usage of polysemous or multifunctional words. The new method utilizes the standardized TTR, which strongly correlates with the index previously proposed. This case study classifies 20,000 examples of the aspect marker -teiru into four meaning groups: continuation, result, experience, and state. The productivity of each group is then calculated, resulting in a value decrease in the same sequence. This result also matches previous studies of the acquisition of -teiru. Furthermore, as a byproduct of this study, a list showing which meaning a verb tends to have was created. Most verbs tend to have one of four meanings.

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In this series, several techniques using Word, Excel, SPSS, and Power Point to construct graphics have been discussed. However, the direct outputs of some software tools are not accepted by some international journals and some of them are technically impossible to be attached to papers．For this solution, some techniques were introduced in this paper as follows: (1) how to construct tables by Excel, (2) more effectively represented cluster analysis results in Excel, (3) how to draw graphics of analysis results of SPSS Amos by using Word, and (4) how to express analysis results of SPSS Decision Trees in Excel．

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International Quantitative Linguistics Conference 2016 (QUALICO2016) was held at Trier University in Trier, Germany from August 24th to 28th. This is the 25th anniversary of the first Quantitative Linguistics conference held in 1991 at Trier University. There were 44 talks with ca. 60 participants coming from 14 different countries. A third of 44 talks were by Asian participants including four participants from Japan. There were varied topics, e.g. the text analysis, the length and the frequency, the discourse analysis, N-gram, the valency theory, the authorship attribution, and data from twitter or Facebook, etc. IQLA Council Business Meeting was also held and new board members were selected. The next conference will be scheduled in a summer 2018 at Wrocław University in Poland.

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On the basis of the fundamental terms and concepts of the general philosophy of science, research strategies and methods of Quantitative Linguistics are described, as conducted in Europe since George Kingsley Zipf's seminal work. These general principles are in line with those practised in the natural sciences. Philosophical considerations as well as some decades of experience show that only specific methodological differences between studies on natural phenomena and on cultural ones such as language can be found. European approaches include empirical (inductive) and theoretical (deductive) strategies with a preference on the latter ones. The presentation starts with a description and explication of some terms and concepts which are fundamental for any kind of research, such as (scientific) problem, hypothesis, law, boundary condition, theory, and explanation – terms, which are often confused in linguistics. Examples are given of how these terms should be applied in linguistic work if the principles of linguistic research as practised in Europe are followed. In particular, the deductive strategy to find new laws is exemplified. The talk will also shed some light on the importance of laws not only for theoretical progress but also for practical purposes. Finally, a recent approaches is described which attempts to give a theoretical modelling background from which new law hypotheses can be derived and known ones can be systemised.

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