Activity Reports

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The 5th Research Seminar "Contrastive Study for Japanese and Other Languages" (17 December 2011)

Date:
Saturday, 17 December 2011, 13.50 to 17.00

Venue:
Room 419 (Conference room, the Institute of Language Research) 4F, Research and Lecture Building

Presenters & Titles:
Tatsuo Miyajima (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Honorary Member)
"Corpus-based comparative analysis of Japanese and English"
Yasujiro Fujinawa (Graduate School of Area and Culture Studies)
"Passivization and Aspectuality: Focusing on non-personal passives in German"
Reiko Suzuki (Graduate School of Area and Culture Studies)
"Lao corresponding to 'no'"

Prof. Miyajima has been with NINJAL for many years and played a leading role at the institute in many projects, especially a large-scale lexicon study which was started several years ago. He introduced interesting similarities and differences in frequency expressions, expressions about food, motion expressions, sports and animal names, based on examples from his latest research which used examples from the "Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese" (BCCWJ) and the "British National Corpus" (BNC), large-scale corpora of the respective languages.

Prof.Fujinawa talked about the relationship between the perfective and non-perfective aspects concerning the passive expressions (werden, sein, bekommen) in German, and their typological characteristics.

Prof. Suzuki introduced and analyzed the Laotian expression (N1+(x)+N2) corresponding to the Japanese "N2+no+N1."

About 30 participants, lecturers, graduate and undergraduate students from the university and external visitors attended and contributed actively to the discussions.