With the development of language corpora, linguists have been able to identify how often specific words, phrases, and expressions are used, and in which contexts. However, applications of corpora in the wider domain of language teaching have remained limited. This article presents an approach to utilizing corpora, combining principles from…

The existence of sound-symbolism (or a non-arbitrary link between form and meaning) is well-attested. However, sound-symbolism has mostly been investigated with nonwords in forced choice tasks, neither of which are representative of natural language. This study uses ideophones, which are naturally occurring sound-symbolic words that depict sensory…

This year's conference theme, "Be Seen, Be Heard," reflected not only our goal of celebrating our achievements but also represented our intent of making sure everyone's voices are heard, especially during 2017's difficult political climate. The conference opened with a motivating address from Dean Laura E. Lyons, followed by an…

There have been many studies on the acquisition of English unaccusative verbs which make use of learner corpora. Most of these studies have so far concluded that even advanced learners of English ungrammatically passivize unaccusative verbs and produce sentences such as "*The accident was happened" and "*The mobile phone was…

This paper argues that due to the facts of accent shift, Japanese accent should itself be interpreted as pitch rather than as a diacritic on the basis of which pitch patterns are imposed by rule. The solution offered is tentative and concerns only Tokyo Japanese. It is suggested that consideration of accent in non-Tokyo dialects will strengthen…

This study investigated how Japanese telephone closings were realized between intimates with regard to pre-closing, terminal exchange, and leave-taking. Participants were native speakers of Japanese living in the United States who were calling other native Japanese speakers overseas. Researchers audiotaped the international telephone calls.…

This is an English abstract of a Japanese article which discusses the attraction of the Japanese public to a new literary style based on oral language patterns. (JM)

Contrasts Japanese language habits with Western language habits, asserting that Japanese need to speak more concisely, express themselves clearly and frankly, and eliminate superfluous polite language and preliminaries in order to be successful in the efficiency-oriented civilization that is a product of Western culture. (RAE)

A sociolinguistic analysis of English loan words in use in the 1990s in the discourse of young Japanese people is presented. The study drew data from a 1993 survey of undergraduate students at two Osaka (Japan) higher education institutions, one for men and one for women, which asked what loanwords students used and heard often. The report first…

A study used both a survey and observation to investigate the phenomenon of politer speech among Japanese women than among Japanese men. The survey of 256 men and 271 women, parents of college students at a college in Tokyo and representing a middle-class population, inquired about the respondents' personal use of polite forms of Japanese. It is…

As an optional movement, "scrambling" in Japanese has been one of the major obstacles to the Minimalist Program, in which movements occur only when necessary. One theorist has argued, in an attempt to accommodate this phenomenon to the Minimalist Program, that verb phrase-adjunction scrambling should be analyzed as base-generated constructions and…

Some Japanese examples of several common phonological phenomena (whispered vowels, nuclear friction, and consonant-vowel articulation) are examined. The segmental and transformational characterizations of these and related phenomena are reassessed and it is shown that by paying more careful attention to phonetic detail and abandoning conventional…

The grammatical phenomenon in Japanese known as Ga-No conversion is examined. In this phenomenon, the nominative particle "ga" can be converted to genitive particle "no" in embedded sentences with a nominal head such as a relative clause or complementary clause. A pragmatic constraint to this conversion that has not previously been explored is…

A study investigated how a television talk show host manipulates the social and psychological distances in the television show context to entertain guests and audience. An ethnographic approach was taken to the research, and analysis focused on the use of politeness strategies and face-saving and face-threatening interactions. The television talk…

A study of second language acquisition focuses on the transition from formulaic to creative speech patterns. Subjects were two native Japanese-speaking children, aged 4 and 8, learning English as a Second Language in New York, observed over a period of 2 years. The nature of formulaic speech is discussed, drawing from research on such speech and…