This paper discusses corpus-based research on collocations, introduces various tools for querying and extracting Japanese collocations and presents an analysis of Japanese collocations using language corpora and related tools. First, major corpus query tools such as Sketch Engine, NINJAL-NLP, Natsume, Chunagon, which can be used by learners and teachers of Japanese language, are briefly described. Focus then shifts to adjectival and nominal collocates and the resource "Collocation data of adjectives and nouns" which consists of adjective headwords and their nominal collocates extracted from two large corpora, BCCWJ and JpTenTen: 500 adjectives and 9,218 collocate nouns, and 500 adjectives and 23,220 collocate nouns from each corpus respectively. Finally, it is shown that corpus-based resources can be used in the creation of reference materials for learners of the Japanese language. The benefits of empirical research into collocations are also shown by comparing the obtained results with collocations in textbooks for Japanese as foreign language.
COBISS.SI-ID: 56970594
Japanese language for tourism has been conducted mainly outside of Japan. This is in part because the local tourism guide profession is perceived to be relatively high income and because of the increasing demand for Japanese speaking locals. While Japanese language textbooks, syllabuses and other materials have been created in countries with a large number of Japanese tourists such as Indonesia, Thailand, they mainly target beginner-level Japanese language learners. There is thus a need for a higher level of Japanese language competency within the tourism industry in the future as the number of Japanese language learners who are majoring in tourism also increases. Accordingly, the objective of this research is to identify the characteristics of tourism-specific terminology within the Japanese language and determine its advanced vocabulary. Firstly, words not contained within the Japanese Language Proficiency Test level list that appear within a textbook used at a tourism studies course are classified into 5 groups: 1) general proper nouns, 2) proper nouns with a specific usage, 3) specialized terms, 4) compounds of specialized words and general words forming a specialized notion, and 5) other. Next, the specialized terms obtained in this study are used as seed words to create a specialized corpus using the WebBootCat corpus building software. Furthermore, the corpus is compared to a general Japanese language corpus and the nature of the tourism-oriented extracted terms is explored. The results provide the key to understanding this specific academic domain and are valuable not only for foreign language learners but also for native speakers studying tourism.
COBISS.SI-ID: 57005922
Ethnicity in Japan, as in other countries, is an interesting phenomenon to observe, also from the point of view of orthography and other linguistic aspects. The stereotyped representations of members of minority groups and the language used are intimately involved with the maintenance of the carefully constructed national identity. The manner in which Koreans living in Japan are designated has also been contentious, owing to the historical connotations of oppression or political division inherent in the terms representing Korea and Koreans. The multi-scriptal nature of Japanese language is also visible in these terms and highlights the complex relationships between units of language and units of writing but also of units of notion and their sociological background. The usual word for North Korea is ‘chōsen’; for South Korea, ‘kankoku’, both written using Chinese characters. However, to call Koreans ‘chōsenjin’ is felt by many (both Koreans and Japanese alike) to be discriminatory because of the overtones it acquired during the period when Korea was Japan’s colony and called ‘chōsen’; ‘kankokujin’, on the other hand, refers mainly to South Koreans, and thus not include Japan’s ethnic Korean population identified with North Korea. Lately both terms are conflates into ‘zainichi kankoku-chōsenjin’ as an example of a bureaucratic solution aimed at avoiding offence which results in an awkward expression. Over the last decade or so, an increasingly used alternative has been the English word ‘Korean’ written in katakana, such as ‘zainichi korian’. Some explain the usage by saying that it avoids the necessity of making a distinction (inherent in other terminology) between North and South Koreans. It is more likely, however, that the term reflects awareness of a more modern Korea, as well as more modern notions of Korean identity and ethnicity. The aim of this paper is to examine Japanese language terms for Korea and Koreans as used in the large-scale Japanese language corpora, BCCWJ and JpTenTen. Besides looking into the distribution of the terms and their orthographic variants, we examine collocational tendencies of these words and observe the similarities and differences in their word combinations using lexical profiling tools and corpus query systems. The results reveal the differences in distribution of the terms and their orthographic variants in various registers and through the time and that the novel terms ‘koria’ and ‘korian’ written in katakana are yet underrepresented compared to other terms written in Chinese characters but are rather emerging in recent years. Word combinations of the terms show their different semantic tendencies and shed some light on representation of Korea and Koreans in Japan. The study indicates that there is a close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of its language and that the orthographic variants in the lexicon have both, cultural and linguistic background.
COBISS.SI-ID: 57006690