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- Convenors:
-
Yoshiyuki Asahi
(National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics)
Romuald Huszcza (Jagiellonian University)
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- Section:
- Language and Linguistics
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 25 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 25 August, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Analyzing the formation and growth of Kokkai jargon(words/expressions used by National Diet representatives), we will demonstrate that they are used with hedge expressions, then extend their grammatical environments, showing how a jargon becomes a complete item within the representatives' lexicon.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper we will explore the linguistic aspects of the formation and growth of Kokkai jargon. As such, Kokkai jargon is not understandable even to native speakers of Japanese, unless they are specialists in domestic politics.
Through the four cases of such jargon presented in this paper (terebi-iri "televized", okyoo-yomi "sutra-chanting", misin-me "perforation" and nikuzure "load-shifting"), that were extracted from the Minutes of the National Diet, I will show that they are used with hedge expressions (iwayuru, to iimasuka, etc.) first, and then extend to the grammatical environments in which they occur.
Such steps can be interpreted as a process by which Kokkai jargon grow into fully-fledged lexical items within the representatives' lexicon. That is, even though they were first formed as one of the numerous nonce lexical items in the utterances of representatives (including those made inside and outside of the session), some of them were found to be useful, filling the gaps in expressing a complex concept, and come to be used repeatedly in their speeches. At first, as they expect that these words may not be part of their audience's lexicon, the representatives introduce them with hedge expressions. They are also used without any grammatical extensions. As they are used frequently throughout the sessions, however, these words begin to appear in various grammatical environments. For example, they may be used as a verb root (e.g. okyoo-yomi-suru), or as a part of a compound noun (e.g. terebi-iri-situgi). At this stage, what used to be a nonce formed new word can be deemed a part of the permanent lexicon of the representatives, as they show regular grammatical behavior in the same way that common words do.
Our result demonstrates that there is a linguistic path along which a Kokkai jargon develops. Moreover, it shows the usefulness of the Minutes of the Diet as linguistic data, in that it enables us to observe language change in a detailed manner.
Paper short abstract:
For Japan, parliamentary records are an understudied source highly rich in context. Using topic models and grounded theory, analyses on how concepts evolve with time can be carried out. The approach is applied to the concept of data, giving insight into the discourse on the digital transformation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an outcome of larger project which analyzes the discourse on the "digital transformation" in Japan. For investigating this discourse, it is highly insightful to track how the concept of data evolved. Following the approach of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) in the footsteps of Reinhart Koselleck, the further procedure would be to investigate how the term dēta (the standard translation of "data") is used in representative Japanese texts and to systematically analyze these. Instead, a very large number of texts is collected and investigated using topic models.
A corpus where all documents are context-rich and inherently relevant for politics has been chosen: parliamentary records. While projects in the digital humanities like the ParlaCLARIN workshops explore and gather insight about these for a variety of countries, the Japanese National Diet has not been given much attention yet. This is surprising, as all sessions since 1947 are completely digitalized and accessible via a well-documented API. Following this thought, an adaption of an already existing software tool for browsing a Japanese-language text corpus guided by a topic model has been carried out. Given a keyword - in this case, dēta -, all relevant speeches by members of parliament in a given timespan are retrieved, and the resulting corpus is analyzed through topic modeling. By having a link in the metadata, each speech - often part of an exchange of with multiple speakers - can be seen in context at the official website of the Diet.
In this setting, deducing satisfying results requires a systematic combination of distant reading and close reading, often referred to as blended reading. But as it has been pointed out by David Mimno in 2017, this practice can be considered equivalent to engaging in grounded theory. How the categories are created, and what they mean for writing a conceptual history, is explored in this paper.
As the need for triangulation using multiple text corpora is well acknowledged, comparison with results gained by mining a corpus of articles from the Nihon Keizai Shinbun (which focuses on business and industry) is presented to point out limitations of the approach.