Paper short abstract:

This presentation will discuss the challenges of place name annotation in (Old) Japanese corpora such as identifying place name borders and translating complex place names. A corpus-based investigation into the morphology of place names in (Old) Japanese will then be introduced.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is inspired by the author’s experience with place name annotation for the Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese (ONCOJ). In comparison with the Corpus of Historical Japanese I will discuss the challenges and possible solutions for place name annotation in (Old) Japanese corpus, as well as introduce a corpus-based investigation into morphology of place names in (Old) Japanese.

In the first part of my presentation, I will briefly describe the quantitative data and qualitative variety of place names in the corpus of Old Japanese (ONCOJ).

In the second part I will discuss what kind of linguistic challenges I met when annotating place names in the corpus. Specifically, I will talk about:

- Identifying boundaries and morphological structure of place names in Old Japanese texts (e.g., should 飛鳥川 ‘Asuka-gawa’ be treated as a place name ‘Asuka’ and a common noun ‘river’, or as a complex place name ‘Asuka-gawa’?)

- Dealing with ‘cranberry’ morphemes in Japanese place names (e.g. Kagu-yama)

Finally, based on the analysis of place names in the ONCOJ and in comparison with the Corpus of Historical Japanese, I will suggest my own typology of place names based on their morphological structure. I will also discuss the strategies that can be used when translating different types of complex place names.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will introduce the background to the development of the Japanese-English parallel corpus online search tool "Parallel Link" developed by the author, and its potential applications using the compilation of Japanese-English dictionaries as an example.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will first introduce the history of the Japanese-English parallel corpora released to date and their linguistic applications with several examples. Then, it will present the background and procedures to developing the Japanese-English parallel corpus online search tool "Parallel Link" developed by the author (e.g., text processing, annotation, creation of full-text search indexes, and file organization applied to these parallel corpora).

Next, I will show its potential applications using the compilation of Japanese-English dictionaries as an example. In particular, I will present concrete data on improving the Japanese-English dictionary description of the Japanese verbs 'Katameru' and 'Tateru' as examples. The basic data are extracted from a general-reference corpus of Japanese, Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), as a benchmark of Japanese usage, and also from Japanese-English parallel corpora in Parallel Link, to check the authentic Japanese-English translation units. These data are examined across semantic categories as well as descriptive grammar and frequencies, which are then compared with the descriptions present in the several current Japanese-English dictionaries. The presentation will finally highlight an original sample manuscript based on the corpus-driven approach, to show the feasibility of utilizing parallel corpora in the bilingual dictionary compilation in the future.

Paper short abstract:

Using The Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese, this presentation aims to describe and analyse the distribution of Old Japanese (700—800AD) genitive case particles no and ga with a focus on noun-modifying constructions (NP-ga/no NP).

Paper long abstract:

In “standard” Modern Japanese (1600 onwards), no is the only productive genitive particle. However, in Old Japanese (700—800AD), the oldest attested stage of the language, no and ga were both productive genitives and shared similar main functions: they were both used in adnominalization (NP-ga/no NP) and in subject marking (NP-ga/no VP). Despite their functional similarities, the two particles were distributed differently. In general, the use of ga was far more restricted than that of no. In this presentation I will not consider ga or no used to connect clauses to a following noun or predicate (S ga/no N, or S ga V), or the use of no as an adnominal copula form.

Until now, there have been no exhaustive investigation of genitive no and ga in Old Japanese using modern linguistic frameworks. The principal aim of this presentation is to disentangle the distribution of Old Japanese no and ga with a focus on noun-modifying constructions, such as tuma ga ipye ‘my spouse’s house’ and twomibito no ipye ‘a wealthy person’s house’. The descriptive and analytic work of this presentation is part of an on-going doctoral research project titled No and ga in Old Japanese: a synchronic and diachronic study. The empirical data presented is based on The Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese and includes all examples where the particles, no and ga, are phonographically written. The presentation is split into two main parts. I first provide a comprehensive synchronic description of no and ga’s distribution in noun-modifying constructions. Then, based on the synchronic data, I discuss a number of factors that may influence the choice of no and ga in adnominalization, drawn from past literature on the subject as well as cross-linguistic studies on genitive variation. These factors include animacy, referentiality/specificity, relationality, possessive relations, various pragmatic factors, and so on. The qualitative analysis suggests that multiple factors are at work to condition the distribution of no and ga — in particular, animacy. These results are tested by quantitative analytical methods such as a multivariate statistical analysis to determine whether the different factors interact with each other, and if so, how.