Activity Reports

It is an activity report of the center

"Contrastive Study for Japanese and Other Languages" The 4th Research Seminar

Date: 2011, July 16 (Sat), 15:15-18:00
Venue: Room 419 (Conference room, the Institute of Language Research) 4F, Research and Lecture Building

Presenters & Titles:
Hiromi Ueda (TUFS)
"A Cambodian education experiment based on a comparison with Japanese"
Kiyoko Kataoka (Kyushu University)
"Japanese and Spanish from the perspective of negation-related phenomena"
Naoki Ogose (The University of Tokyo)
"A contrastive study on Korean and Japanese - seemingly similar but actually different"

Ms. Ueda introduced in detail, the principles of the Cambodian Language education for the first and second year of the Cambodian major in the Faculty of Foreign Studies, and its implementation over the years by using specific examples. Unlike English, Cambodian is a language where it is difficult to set education goals from a practical point of view, but it is because of this that the Faculty aims through learning Cambodian, for learners to only improve their analytic ability, but also acquire the way of looking at things analytically and from the presentation, it seems that it has achieved a rather high level of success. Participants also agreed that learning under this principle helps to enlighten students on the structure of their mother tongue, Japanese. Ms. Kataoka has published a book on negation in Japanese and is active in contrastive research on expressions of negation between Japanese and Spanish. In her presentation, she introduced her research background and theoretical framework, and using specific examples of expressions of negation in Japanese and Spanish, she also analyzed various negative sentences theoretically from the points of view of universality and individual features in syntactic structure and vocabulary features. Speaking in a lively Osaka dialect, she managed to make the difficult subject of syntactic theory slightly approachable. Mr. Ogose has been involved in contrastive research between Korean and Japanese and Korean Language education for many years. The two languages have often been said to be very similar, but while this may be so, there are also not a few differences of which some were introduced in his presentation. In particular, he touched on the acceptability boundaries of indirect passive sentences, and the subtle differences in the applicable ranges of the genitive case ("no" in Japanese and the corresponding Korean marker) in the two languages. Many in the audience were native Korean speakers who asked interesting questions.

About 40 participants, lecturers, graduate and undergraduate students from the university and external visitors attended and contributed actively to the discussions.