Literatura científica selecionada sobre o tema "Japanese language – word frequency – dictionaries"

It is my pleasure to introduce this thematic issue dedicated to the lexicography of Japanese as a second or foreign language, the first thematic issue in Acta Linguistica Asiatica since its inception.Japanese has an outstandingly long and rich lexicographical tradition, but there have been relatively few dictionaries of Japanese targeted at learners of Japanese as a foreign or second language until the end of the twentieth century. With the growth of Japanese language teaching and learning around the world, the rapid development of very large scale linguistic resources and language processing technologies for Japanese, a new generation of aggregated, collectively developed or crowd-sourced resources evolving in the context of the social web, a shift from static paper to constantly developing electronic resources, the spread of internet access on hand-held devices, and new approaches to the use of language reference resources stemming from these developments, dictionaries and other reference resources for learners, teachers and users of Japanese as a foreign/second language are being developed and used in new ways in different user communities. However, information about such developments often does not reach researchers, lexicographers, dictionary users and language teachers in other user communities or research spheres. This special issues wishes to contribute to the spread of such information by presenting some recent developments in this growing field.Having received a very lively response to our call for papers, not all papers selected for publishing could fit into this issue, and part of them will be included in the December issue of ALA, which is also going to be dedicated to Japanese lexicography.The first round of papers included in this issue presents a varied cross-section of current JFL lexicographical work and research. All papers in this issue point out the relative scarcity of appropriate reference works for learners of Japanese as a foreign language, especially when compared to lexicographical resources for Japanese native speakers, and each of the endeavours presented here confronts this lack with its own original approach. Reflecting the paradigm shift in Japanese language research, where corpus research is again playing a central role, most papers presented here take advantage of the bounty of newly available corpora and web data, most prominent among which is the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo, and which is used by Mogi, Pardeshi et al. and Sunakawa et al. in their lexicographical research and projects, while Blin taps data for his research from the web, another increasingly important linguistic resource.The first two papers offer two perspectives on existing Japanese dictionaries. Tom Gally in his paper Kokugo Dictionaries as Tools for Learners: Problems and Potential points out the drawbacks of currently available Japanese dictionaries from the perspective of learners of Japanese as a foreign language, but at the same time offers a very detailed and convincing explanation of the merits of monolingual Japanese dictionaries for native speakers (kokugo dictionaries), such as their comprehensiveness, detailedness and quantity of contextual information, when compared to bilingual dictionaries, which make them a potentially useful resource even for an audience they are not targeting - foreign language learners. His detailed explanation of possible uses and potential hurdles and pitfalls learners may encounter in using them, is not only accurate and informative, but also of immediate practical value for language teachers and lexicographers.Toshinobu Mogi, in his paper Towards the Lexicographic Description of the Grammatical Behaviour of Japanese Loanwords: A Case Study, investigates the lexicographic description of loanwords in Japanese reference works and notes how information offered by currently available dictionaries, especially regarding the grammatical aspects of loanword use, is not sufficient for learners of Japanese as a foreign language. After pointing our the deficiencies of current dictionary descriptions and noting how dictionaries sense divisions do not reflect the frequency of different senses in actual use, as reflected in a large-scale representative general corpus of Japanese, he uses a fascinatingly detailed analysis of the behaviour of a Japanese loanword verb to describe a corpus-based method of lexical description, based on the correspondence between usage forms and senses, which could be used for the compilation of Japanese learners' dictionaries meant for the reception and production of Japanese.The second part of this special issue is composed of four reports on particular aspects of ongoing lexicographical work targeted at learners of Japanese as a foreign language.Prashant Pardeshi, Shingo Imai, Kazuyuki Kiryu, Sangmok Lee, Shiro Akasegawa and Yasunari Imamura in their paper Compilation of Japanese Basic Verb Usage Handbook for JFL Learners: A Project Report, after pointing out - as other authors in this issue - the lack of a detailed and pedagogically sound lexicographical description of Japanese basic vocabulary for foreign learners, propose a corpus-based on-line system which incorporates insights from cognitive grammar, contrastive studies and second language acquisition research to solve this problem. They present their current implementation of such a system, which includes audio-visual material and translations into Chinese, Korean and Marathi. The system also uses natural language processing techniques to support lexicographers who need to process daunting amounts of corpus data in order to produce detailed lexical descriptions based on actual use.The next article by Marcella Maria Mariotti and Alessandro Mantelli, ITADICT Project and Japanese Language Learning, focus on the learner's perspective. They present a collaborative project in which Italian learners of Japanese compiled an on-line Japanese-Italian dictionary using a purposely developed on-line dictionary editing system, under the supervision of a small group of teachers. One practical and obvious outcome of the project is a Japanese-Italian freely accessible lexical database, but the authors also highlight the pedagogical value of such an approach, which stimulates students' motivation for learning, hones their ICT skills, makes them more aware of the structure and usability of existing lexicographic and language learning resources, and helps them learn to cooperate on a shared task and exchange peer support.The third project report by Raoul Blin, Automatic Addition of Genre Information in a Japanese Dictionary, focuses on the labelling of lexical genre, an aspect of word usage which is not satisfactorily presented in current Japanese dictionaries, despite its importance for foreign language learners when using dictionaries for production tasks. The article describes a procedure for automatic labelling of genre by means of a statistical analysis of internet-derived genre-specific corpora. The automatisation of the process simplifies its later reiteration, thus making it possible to observe lexical genre development over time.The final paper in this issue is a report on The Construction of a Database to Support the Compilation of Japanese Learners’ Dictionaries, by Yuriko Sunakawa, Jae-ho Lee and Mari Takahara. Motivated by the lack of Japanese bilingual learners' dictionaries for speakers of most languages in the world, the authors engaged in the development of a database of detailed corpus-based descriptions of the vocabulary needed by learners of Japanese from beginning to advanced level. By freely offering online the basic data needed for bilingual dictionary compilation, they are building the basis from which editors in under-resourced language areas will be able to compile richer and more up-to-date contents even with limited human and financial resources. This project is certainly going to greatly contribute to the solution of existing problems in Japanese learners' lexicography.

Two empirical studies were conducted in which the differences in Japanese EFL learners' look-up behavior between hand-held electronic dictionaries (EDs) and printed dictionaries (PDs) were investigated. We focus here on the relation between learners' look-up frequency and degree of reading comprehension of the text. In the first study, a total of 34 college students were divided into two groups. Each group was assigned a reading task with a quiz under two conditions: ED and PD. The frequency of looked-ups, the time the students needed for the task, and the quiz scores in each condition were statistically examined. The results showed: (a) the subjects in the ED condition looked up more words to comprehend the texts in a shorter period of time than those in the PD group and (b) no significant difference in the quiz scores between the groups. To further investigate these results under different conditions, a second study was performed with 31 university students whose English proficiency levels were higher than those in the first study. Despite the fact that the subjects and the text used in the second study were different, the results of the second study corresponded to the first. These findings indicate that, although EDs might enhance EFL learners' look-up behaviors, the increased look-up frequency does not necessarily ensure improvement in learners' reading comprehension. Some pedagogical implications are suggested based on the findings.

<p>There is cumulative evidence suggesting that hyper-glossing facilitates lower-level processing and enhances reading comprehension. There are plentiful studies on electronic dictionaries for English. However, research on e-dictionaries for languages with no boundaries between words is still scarce. The main aim for the current study is to investigate the usage and efficacy of e-dictionaries for Japanese language learners. This article reports the results of two studies concerning e-dictionaries: a survey study investigating the use of e-dictionaries (with a particular focus on e-glossaries that change a digital text into a hypertext) by L2 learners of Japanese, and a comparative study examining existing e-glossaries to evaluate whether they provide the optimal level of support for reading Japanese e-texts. The results of the survey showed that learners have their preferred e-dictionaries (in most cases, e-word dictionaries in which the user can look up individual words), and that few learners are aware of the existence of e-glossaries. The results of further study revealed that existing e-glossaries have various functions, but lack some requisite information crucial to the target language. This study suggests that technical issues revolving around the lack of spaces between words may be a reason for the lag in usage and efficacy of e-glossaries for languages without word boundaries.</p>

Writing by learners of Japanese as a foreign language often contains words that do not fit the style of their context. One possible reason for this is the lack of information on word connotation and usage labels in existing dictionaries. The present study examines the current state of connotational information and register labels in Japanese learner’s dictionaries, Japanese language dictionaries and dictionaries of synonyms, and proposes a possible technique for analysing the words’ descriptions. The study reveals that Japanese learner’s dictionaries and dictionaries for Japanese native speakers use different register labels and assign them from a different perspective. In the case of synonyms, presenting them in their context of use appears to be more useful than only listing them. Finally, the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ - Gendai Nihongo Kakikotoba Kinkoo Koopasu) is used to show how corpora can be a very important linguistic resource for the analysis of lexical register.

In compiling both Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) word lists for foreign language learners and LSP dictionaries, the headword-selection process is of paramount importance. LSP word lists and LSP dictionaries will function effectively if they contain appropriate terms and register items, i.e. the lexical items that end users need. In this paper, we first present corpus-based LSP word lists, with special emphasis on how they were compiled. In the process, the make-up and size of the specialised corpus are important, as is the choice of the headword selection methods used. Among the possible criteria are word frequency, keyness, specialised occurrence, range, and dispersion, as well as some non-corpus linguistic methods that are more rarely applied. A greater variety of methods is used for compiling headword lists for LSP dictionaries, and of the corpus linguistic methods, frequency is typically solely applied. The article compares headword selection procedures for LSP word lists and LSP dictionaries before discussing how they can mutually inform one another.

This article is devoted to the study of Japanese loanwords in Chinese and their classification. Particular attention is paid to the lexical units in writing in Chinese characters, coming from the Japanese language as graphic loanwords in modern Chinese and Japanese, popular on the Chinese-language Internet. The material of the study is loanwords of Japanese origin, selected from dictionaries and scientific works on this topic, as well as word usage in messages on Russian and Chinese Internet forums. We distinguish between two types of Japanese loanwords in Chinese according to how they are borrowed: phonetic and graphic borrowed words. Graphic borrowed from the Japanese language, including the actual Japanese words spelled in Chinese characters, and words created by the Japanese using Chinese characters to convey tokens of other languages, as well as the words of the ancient Chinese language, rethought by the Japanese to create terms, then returned back to modern Chinese language, constitute a characteristic group of graphic loanwords in Chinese.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the theoretical problems of a new direction – psycholinguistic lexicography. The accumulation of a large amount of factual experimental material required the development of principles for fixing the psycholinguistic description of the meaning of a word in lexicographic sources. The theoretical basis of the study was the ideas of Professor I.A. Sternin, the founder of the Voronezh Psycholinguistic School, about the possibility of describing the psychologically real semantics of a word based on the experimental data and about the formation of psycholinguistic semasiology, the main concept of which is the concept of the psycholinguistic meaning of a word (the meaning of a word represented in the linguistic consciousness of a native speaker), and the main method was that of semantic interpretation of experimental data. The paper shows the main differences between psycholinguistic and traditional explanatory dictionaries. The classification of types of psycholinguistic dictionaries was developed. Two types of psycholinguistic dictionaries were distinguished – associative dictionaries and semantic dictionaries. The principles of presentation of semantic material in psycholinguistic lexicographic sources have a number of distinctive features in comparison with associative dictionaries, the main of which is the indication of the degree of brightness of individual semantic features and individual meanings and their ranking in the descending order of the brightness index. The paper presents the general algorithm for creating a psycholinguistic semantic dictionary and the structure of its dictionary entry. An important issue of the psycholinguistic explanatory dictionary creation is the criterion for selecting its units. The following principles are proposed for the selection of dictionary units of this type of dictionaries: 1) word frequency; 2) social significance; 3) semantic instability; 4) semantic differentiation; 5) part-of-speech reference. A separate direction of psycholinguistic lexicography is represented by differential dictionaries, which contain a comparative description of the semantics of a word in a group language consciousness; various possibilities of constructing a dictionary entry of differential psycholinguistic dictionaries are shown, examples of fixing psycholinguistic meanings of words in differential psycholinguistic dictionaries of the Russian language are given.

This is a preliminary study of research development for creating a dictionary of high-frequency words (HFW). Thus, this study tries to analyze the need of the ILF learners as the users of a dictionary of HFW for their ILF learning. A list of high-frequency words should be used in ILF learning so that the learning objectives can be achieved effectively. Unfortunately, the word list is not yet available. The ILF learners, especially those at the beginner level, still have difficulty using the Great Dictionary of the Indonesian Language (KBBI). They prefer using translation apps to obtain the meaning of a word, even though these apps do not always help. Employing a descriptive survey, this study involved a total of 183 ILF teachers and learners. The data were gathered through Google-form questionnaires. In addition, interviews were administered with selected ILF teachers who had a teaching experience of more than 15 years. The findings revealed that the teachers and learners had different beliefs on the vocabulary forms needed for making a dictionary of HFW. The learners still did not understand the concepts of high-frequency words. According to the teachers, HFW was more needed for ILF learning. Meanwhile, for the learners, general words were more needed. Besides, digital dictionaries were more in demand than printed dictionaries. Bilingual dictionaries were more needed than monolingual dictionaries. Both the teachers and learners believed that the dictionary of HFW should comprise sentence examples. They both agreed that the dictionary of HFW should provide information about the use of words in sentence examples, affixes, synonymous phrases, antonyms, word classes, and phonetics. Therefore, the results of this research analysis can be used as a basis for developing a dictionary that fits the needs of ILF-1 learners.

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of the word family with the root -свят/свящ- based on historical dictionaries of the Russian language, the purpose of the study is to conduct a preliminary analysis of the presentation of the words of this family in different dictionaries of the Russian language, namely, historical and modern. The statistical approach to lexical data demonstrates that the data obtained from five historical dictionaries contain a large number of words that no longer function in the modern Russian language, compared to certain dictionaries of modern Russian. I.I. Sreznevsky's Dictionary includes 105 words; Dictionary of Old Russian Language (11th–14th centuries) has 73 words; Russian Dictionary XI-XVII Centuries involves 210 words; Dictionary of the Russian Academy includes 61 words; Dictionary of the Church Slavonic language of 1847 has 150 words; Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language by Vladimir Dahl involves 124 words. When comparing quantitative data in all the historical dictionaries, the largest group comprises lexemes with the secondary root -свящ-. Moreover, all the words of this word family are not only etymologically related, but have the same root, since they maintain unity in their seme content that allows to analyze the semantic density of the root. In addition, a homogeneous stylistic marking of words of the word family also confirms their affinity, as all the words of this word family are genetically related to Church Slavonic and belong to the religious sphere. Graphs of the use of the words святой, святость (saint, sanctity) and свящeнный (holy) based on the Russian National Corpus demonstrate a decrease in the frequency of these words since the middle of the 19th century, and a comparison of the list of words of this word family from each historical dictionary with the modern linguistic consciousness directly indicates a drastic reduction in quantitative content of this word family, that occurred due to extralinguistic (historical and ideological) reasons.

CITE/Language Arts
Ed.D.
In a series of studies using semantic relatedness judgment response times, Jiang (2000, 2002, 2004a) has claimed that L2 lexical entries fossilize with their equivalent L1 content or something very close to it. In another study using a more productive test of lexical knowledge (Jiang 2004b), however, the evidence for this conclusion was less clear. The present study is a partial replication of Jiang (2004b) with Japanese learners of English. The aims of the study are to investigate the influence of the first language (L1) on second language (L2) lexical knowledge, to investigate whether lexical knowledge displays frequency-related, emergent properties, and to investigate the influence of the L1 on the acquisition of L2 word pairs that have a common L1 equivalent. Data from a sentence completion task was completed by 244 participants, who were shown sentence contexts in which they chose between L2 word pairs sharing a common equivalent in the students' first language, Japanese. The data were analyzed using the statistical analyses available in the programming environment R to quantify the participants' ability to discriminate between synonymous and non-synonymous use of these L2 word pairs. The results showed a strong bias against synonymy for all word pairs; the participants tended to make a distinction between the two synonymous items by assigning each word a distinct meaning. With the non-synonymous items, lemma frequency was closely related to the participants' success in choosing the correct word in the word pair. In addition, lemma frequency and the degree of similarity between the words in the word pair were closely related to the participants' overall knowledge of the non-synonymous meanings of the vocabulary items. The results suggest that the participants had a stronger preference for non-synonymous options than for the synonymous option. This suggests that the learners might have adopted a one-word, one-meaning learning strategy (Willis, 1998). The reasonably strong relationship between several of the usage-based statistics and the item measures from R suggest that with exposure learners are better able to use words in ways that are similar to native speakers of English, to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate contexts and to recognize the boundary separating semantic overlap and semantic uniqueness. Lexical similarity appears to play a secondary role, in combination with frequency, in learners' ability to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate contexts when using L2 word pairs that have a single translation in the L1.
Temple University--Theses

Many researchers (e.g., Nation, 2001, 2015; Schmitt, 2000) have recognized the importance of vocabulary learning in second language (L2) or additional language (AL) acquisition. The strong effects of lexical and background knowledge on L2reading comprehension have similarly been found in various studies (e.g., Hu & Nation, 2000; Rokni & Hajilari, 2013). In the case of Japanese language, the opportunities for acquiring the lexical and background knowledge associated with Japanese history and culture, especially traditional culture, are scant, because only a small number of Japanese pedagogical materials deal minimally with these topics. Meanwhile, many learners are motivated to study Japanese because of their interest in Japanese history and culture, according to a survey conducted by the Japan Foundation in 2012. This project aimed to increase the opportunities for learning Japanese history and traditional culture through the development of new pedagogical materials based on kabuki, and then the empirical evaluation of the developed pedagogical materials. Nine Chinese-as-a-first-language Japanese learners at the upper-intermediate level participated in the nine-week online course, including the pre- and post-course tests in the first and last weeks. Employing a multi-method research approach, the study examined the changes in learners’ lexical and background knowledge related to Japanese history and culture, their reading comprehension, and their interest in kabuki. Four kinds of multiple-choice tests were administered to collect the quantitative data. In addition, the qualitative data were gathered through the pre- and post-course questionnaires and post-course individual interviews. Overall, the findings indicated that almost all participants increased their background knowledge of kabuki, as well as their vocabulary related to kabuki and general theatrical performances. The results in other areas, such as historical vocabulary, vocabulary depth, reading comprehension, and historical background knowledge were mixed. Further, concerning the depth of vocabulary knowledge, it was found that the learning of vocabulary depth was more difficult than learning of vocabulary breadth. Likewise, the knowledge of use, such as collocations and register constraints, was found to be more difficult to learn than other aspects of vocabulary depth. The participants’ reports in the post-course questionnaire and individual interviews showed that most participants seemed to have increased their interest in kabuki. Overall, the first-of-their-kind developed pedagogical materials contributed to the development of lexical and background knowledge, specifically knowledge associated with Japanese traditional culture and history. This study may provide a model for an evidence-based approach to the development of pedagogical materials that practitioners can adopt or adapt.
Graduate

Abstract One often hears the argument that in order to eliminate sexist language, it is first necessary to eliminate sexism; as long as there is sexism, it is useless to problematize sexist language alone. However, I argue that the existence of sexist language supports and reproduces sexist attitudes and it is, thus, essential to problematize sexist language itself. In this chapter, I focus on three of the many derogatory words used to describe women in Japanese. I examine their treatment both in a sample of Japanese language dictionaries and, more briefly, in the media. While the use of sexist expressions in the media has decreased considerably over time, in dictionaries the treatment of many sexist words remains largely unchanged. Although media have their own shaping effects on the public understanding of gender (see chapters 6 and 7, this volume), they must, ultimately, attract and retain their audience; not surprisingly, then, popular media are found to be more responsive than dictionaries to social change. Lexicographers, however, are experts who authenticate the words and word meanings we use (Gal 1989). As authenticators of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977), they have a different relation of symbolic power vis-à-vis the public and tend toward a conservative vision of word meaning and usage. One thinks, in this vein, of dictionaries as offering such authoritative information about lexical items as “correct” pronunciation, meaning, orthography, etymology, usage, and the like.

Stylometry is the application of quantitative analysis, primarily to written language, to identify variations in style. Statistical analysis of linguistic characteristics is applied to identify authorship, creation period, and creation order. This study involves stylometric research into “The Tale of Genji,” which is a Japanese classical literary work. “The Tale of Genji” is a long story consisting of 54 volumes. However, in the last 13 volumes, the content is different from that in the other volumes, and the writing quality differs from that of the previous 41 volumes; thus, it has long been theorized that the 13 volumes was written by a different author. The result of an analysis using the word frequency for auxiliary verbs found no evidence that positively support the theory of separate authorship. Therefore, the results indicate that the possibility that there are multiple authors of “The Tale of Genji” is low.

Abstract Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, there has been a quickening of interest among theoretical linguists, and among specialists in lexicography, discourse analysis, language acquisition, and foreign language teaching, in what were traditionally known as ‘idioms’, and are variously called ‘word-combinations’ (Zgusta 1971), ‘fixed expressions’ (Alexander 1987), and ‘phrasal lexemes’ (Pawley 1985; Lipka 1990). The interest reflects a keener awareness than before of the pervasiveness of ready-made memorized combinations in written and spoken language and a wider recognition of the central part they play in first and second language acquisition and in speech production (Bolinger 1976, 1985; Peters 1983; Pawley and Syder 1983). The notion that native-like proficiency in a language depends crucially on knowledge of a stock of prefabricated units, varying in complexity and internal cohesion, can also be seen as a necessary corrective to the atomistic view that the workings of language can be explained by a system of rules of general applicability, a lexicon largely made up of minimal units, and a set of basic principles of semantic interpretation (Fillmore et al. 1988). This shift of perception is partly the outcome of a steady accumulation of descriptive studies throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and questions of analysis and classification will be the chief focus of this survey. Phraseology, as the study of the structure, meaning, and use of wordcombinations, is not a commonly recognized field of activity among British and American linguists (for an East European view, see Arnold 1986; Gläser 1988); but that it has become a significant focus of research, especially perhaps in Europe, is apparent from the attention given to word-combinations in textbooks on lexical semantics (Cruse 1986), lexicology (Carter 1987; Lipka 1990), and vocabulary in language teaching (Carter and McCarthy 1988), and from the publication of a number of phraseological dictionaries (e.g., Cowie et al. 1983; Benson et al. 1986). It is noticeable, too, that despite the continuing influence in collocational analysis of neo-Firthian lexical theory (Sinclair 1987b), with its emphasis on observed frequency of co-occurrence within stated distances (or ‘spans’) in large computerized corpora, the dominant influences in work are a more directly Firthian strain (Mitchell 1971) and East European (specifically Soviet) phraseological theory, first mediated to non-Russian-speaking students through the work of Klappenbach (1968); Weinreich (1969); Arnold (1973); and Lipka (1974).

Ömer Seyfettin, who is one of the important representatives of Turkish literature, has produced works in many fields such as novel, poetry and theater, especially story. In addition to his literary personality, he is one of the rare personalities who make his presence felt in the fields of culture and art. When you look at all this, Ömer Seyfettin; He was a storyteller, poet and intellectual. He left behind tens of pages of works, each of which is the pearl of the Turkish language, after his short life of thirty-six years. In the study, Efruz Bey, who is in the stories of the author, is discussed. The words in the work have been determined in terms of their origin, and the uses of these words have been concretized with examples. The words in the text were then classified according to the languages they were found in. Dictionary study word frequency studies are studies that reveal the frequency of use of words used in a language. Dictionaries are resources that contain the words of a language alphabetically, including idioms and example sentences of that language