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In this study, I examine emoticons, emojis, and stickers in German and Japanese digital conversations. I observed a Japanese LINE group chat and a German WhatsApp group talk over 22 months using ethnographic research methods. The findings indicate that there are various culture-specific features.

Paper long abstract

In this empirical study, I examine visualizations in German and Japanese digital group conversations. For the comparison, I observed an authentic chat of a Japanese LINE group talk and a German WhatsApp group talk over 22 months using ethnographic research methods. In the analysis, three types of graphicons (Herring and Dainas 2017), namely classic emoticons (Western smilies and Japanese kaomoji), emojis and Japanese stickers (Kato 2017) played an important role.

Central questions in the study address the following issues: What type of graphicons are used (which emoticons, emojis, stickers) and with what frequency? Are there individual preferences among the participants in the conversation or is it possible to identify a common group style? At which parts in the conversation are graphicons often used? Are all graphicons only found at the end of sentences or are there also examples at the beginning or in the middle of a sentence? What functions do the respective graphicons fulfil?

In order to answer these questions, I carried out a linguistic discourse analysis. The findings indicate that there are culture-specific peculiarities on the style level. My research reveals differences both in the choice of graphicons and in the way they are used with regard to functions, such as economization or modulization of the chat conversations (Skovholt et al. 2014).

Herring, S., and A. Dainas (2017). “Nice Picture Comment!” Graphicons in Facebook Comment Threads. In Proceedings of the Fiftieth Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2017.264.

Kato, Y. (2017). LINE no sutanpu ga shiyō sareru jōkyō ni kansuru kiso chōsa [Basic Survey on the Use of LINE Stamps]. Journal of information and media studies, 3, 21–34.

Skovholt, K.; Grønning, A.; Kankaaranta, A. (2014): The Communicative Functions of Emoticons in Workplace E-Mails: :-). In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19. 780-797.

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Paper short abstract

This paper addresses changes in okuri-gana (kana added to a kanji character to show suffixes) in modern Japanese, thanks to newly available National Diet Library's abundant n-gram database of modern Japanese publications.

Paper long abstract

In this presentation, based on the rich n-gram database of the National Diet Library, we describe the change in the okuri-gana (kana suffixes added to kanji characters) in modern Japanese. This database is an n-gram text database of the full-text OCR text of 2.47 million items, mainly modern materials, that the National Diet Library has digitally scanned and will be publicly released on a trial basis in 2022 and all OCR text made available in 2023. This database has a significant quantity of Japanese historical materials and, although it is only OCR text, it has the potential to innovate modern Japanese research when used in combination with existing high-quality corpora. Okuri-gana have changed significantly from those that indicate only derived suffixes or inflectional forms (e.g., "分る" wakar-u vs. "分ける" wake-ru vs. "分つ" wakat-u) to those that indicate the entire inflectional word ending (e.g., "分かる" vs. "分ける" vs. "分つ"), as claimed by Makoto Yanaike (Most recently in "'Arieta moo hitotsu no michi' kara meiji irai no okuri-gana-hoo no seikaku o kangaeru" in "Nihongogaku" Vol. 36, No. 12, 2017). Until now, the change of okuri-gana has not been fully understood due to the limited size of available corpora. However, with this new database, it is now possible to study it in more detail. In this research, we selected words with significant changes in okuri-gana from the data of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics' modern Japanese corpus and examined their changes in the National Diet Library's n-gram database. As a result, we found that around 1890, okuri-gana began to more often indicate the entire reading of the word. This is thought to be related to the widespread use of movable type printing and the advancement of inflectional research. This can be understood as a desire for standardization and the making of a language into a codified one.

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While English language publications on Japanese linguistics have increased in recent years, the lack of a standard for glossing Japanese examples has created a major barrier for researchers. In this talk, we will present a user-friendly glossing standard for Modern and Classical Japanese.

Paper long abstract

The past decade has brought a major surge in English language publications on the Japanese language and linguistics, as evidenced by such comprehensive series as the Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics (De Gruyter Mouton, 2015–) or the soon to be commenced English language journal of the Society for Japanese Linguistics, Language in Japan (2023–). The lack of established translations for much of the terminology specific to Japanese linguistics and a standard for transcribing and adding morphemic glosses to Japanese examples in English publications, however, has created a major barrier for researchers wishing to publish their work in English.

The KAKENHI project “Development of a multilingual dictionary of Japanese linguistics terminology and a glossing standard for Japonic languages” was launched in 2019 as an attempt to overcome such a barrier. After four years of continued progress, its members have succeeded in creating a multilingual dictionary containing translations from English and other major languages of over 5,000 common terms from Japanese linguistics and a glossing standard for both Modern Standard Japanese and Classical Japanese. Currently, we are working on glossing standards for several major dialects and Ryūkyūan languages.

This presentation will provide an overview of the progress of our project, focusing on our glossing standard for Classical and Modern Japanese. Our glossing standard follows the basic principles set forth by the Leipzig Glossing Rules, while providing numerous conventions specific to Japanese, such as how to treat particles or where to draw the morpheme boundaries between the stems of verbs and their suffixes. A defining feature of our standard is that it includes a list of all of the major (and many minor) functional morphemes from Classical and Modern Standard Japanese together with three-letter glossing labels for each morpheme. Our standard also provides a detailed set of guidelines on how to add period-appropriate phonemicizations to Japanese sources from all periods of the language from Old Japanese to Modern Japanese. It is our hope that by making this standard widely available to researchers both inside and outside of Japan, it will promote a more active discourse on Japanese linguistics in English.