Abstract
This paper examines the topic-specific words extracted from a contact-situation conversation corpus of Japanese. The corpus that was analyzed contains 38 original Skype conversation sessions of 9 pairs of Japanese learners and native speakers on preselected topics. After manually dividing the entire corpus (approximately 200,000 words) into 13 subcorpora by topic, many substantial words and some function words were extracted as topic-specific. Although previous research has suggested that function words are not topic-dependent, this study shows that Japanese function words do, in fact, have a tendency of occurrence. For example, tense and aspect markers occur frequently for the topic “pop-culture,” while nominative markers and existential sentences occur for the topic “town.” This tendency may represent a fundamental resource for developing materials and textbook for both topic-based ones and grammar-structural ones.
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Article note
This paper is based on a presentation which was presented at ICPLJ 10 held on July 8 and 9, 2017 at NINJAL. I am grateful those who gave me insightful comments and suggestions. I also thank to anonymous reviewers who gave me valuable comments to improve the quality of this paper. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP26770180, JP15H03216, JP18H00676.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editors’ Notes
- Articles
- Connecting L1 and L2 acquisition: From the perspective of macro and micro narrative structure
- The influence of first language on referential expressions of Japanese language learners: A focus on narrative story by native Chinese and Korean speakers
- Constructing fluid relationships through language: A study of address terms in a Japanese drama and its pedagogical implications
- Vocabulary depends on topic, and so does grammar
- Word recognition in a language with multiple orthographies: A semantic masked-priming study of L1 Mandarin learners of L3 Japanese
- Book Reviews
- Masayoshi Shibatani, Shigeru Miyagawa, and Hisashi Noda: Handbook of Japanese Syntax
- Noun-Modifying Clause Constructions in Languages of Eurasia: Rethinking Theoretical and Geographical Boundaries