Corpus language input, corpus processes in learning, learner corpus product. Introduction

International audienc

国立国語研究所要覧 2020/2021

英語併

European Approaches to Japanese Language and Linguistics

In this volume European specialists of Japanese language present new and original research into Japanese over a wide spectrum of topics which include descriptive, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and didactic accounts. The articles share a focus on contemporary issues and adopt new approaches to the study of Japanese that often are specific to European traditions of language study. The articles address an audience that includes both Japanese Studies and Linguistics. They are representative of the wide range of topics that are currently studied in European universities, and they address scholars and students alike

Creating pre-Evaluation opportunity spaces in IRE sequences: Evidence from Italian L2 classrooms in a University Context.

This thesis explores L2 classroom teacher-fronted activities organised in Initiation-Response- Evaluation (IRE) sequences, during beginner and intermediate lessons of Italian at the University level. More specifically, the study analyses the ways in which teachers address a variety of pedagogical contingencies while simultaneously progressing the interaction. It is argued that the tripartite sequential structure provides the teachers with pre-evaluative moments - here defined as pre-Evaluation opportunity spaces - emerging between the student’s responsive move (R) and the teacher’s third positioned evaluation (E). The research draws upon 30 hours of video- and audio-recorded interactions from two University Italian L2 classrooms. The study is informed by multimodal Conversation Analysis and socio-interactional approaches to language learning. Classroom interaction is, thus, regarded as one institutional type of social interaction and - as such - is viewed as jointly achieved by participants, sequentially organised, and relentlessly negotiated on a moment-by-moment basis. The findings show that the teachers regularly exploit specific IRE sequential affordances, such as the inter-move space between the student’s responsive move and the teacher’s evaluation. In particular, the fine-grained analysis of the teachers’ multimodal conduct uncovers how such opportunity space arising between Response and Evaluation may be employed in order to invite peer-correction practices, manage shifting classroom participation frameworks, distribute agency in the L2 classroom, and orient to the omnirelevant property of sequential progressivity while attending to concurrent institutional pressures. Furthermore, the analysis unearths how such intra-move space might be organised through the mobilisation of different semiotic material, such as head nods, pointing gestures, gaze, and body orientation. The findings confirm the adaptive quality of the IRE sequence organisation as one fundamental infrastructure that embodies the reflexive relationship between pedagogy and interaction

The semantics of sustainable development: A corpus-assisted, ecological analysis of discourse across languages

In European societies, sustainable development is often mentioned by politicians and media. But what do politicians and media mean when they use the expression sustainable development? Linguistic research has shown that sustainable development is frequently intended as an unspecified condition that needs to be achieved with an anthropocentric attitude (Alexander 2002, Mahlberg 2007, Naeem et al. 2016). The present research aims at outlining the discursive construction of sustainable development in the political discourse of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and in news discourse appeared after the release of the UN’s resolution. The discursive construction of sustainable development is explored in English, Hungarian and Italian and it is identified by means of two concepts: cultural keywords, namely politically, socially and culturally salient lexemes (Williams 1983); and meaning by collocation, namely the semantics that lexemes acquire thanks to their co-occurring with a limited set of words belonging to certain word classes, fitting a common semantic area and sharing a mutual connotation (Firth 1957, Sinclair 1991). The study of cultural keywords and meaning by collocation is carried out within the theoretical framework of corpus-assisted, ecological analysis of discourse with a cross-linguistic approach. The discursive construction of sustainable development is investigated in two corpora: the 2030 Agenda Corpus and the Sustainable development Corpus (or SusCorp). The 2030 Agenda Corpus is a multilingual, parallel corpus of political discourse including the English, Hungarian and Italian versions of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; the English, Hungarian and Italian sections of the corpus count between 15,000 and 18,000 tokens each. The SusCorp is a multilingual, comparable corpus of news discourse containing broadsheet articles published between 2016 and 2018 in the English, Hungarian and Italian press; the English, Hungarian and Italian sections of the corpus count between 250,000 and 450,000 tokens each. The two corpora are analysed in turn in search for cultural keywords and meaning by collocation. Cultural keywords are found among the most frequent and statistically salient lexemes of the English, Hungarian and Italian subcorpora. Meaning by collocation is outlined by extracting the collocational patterns of the English lexical items sustainable, sustainability, sustainable development and their Hungarian and Italian translational equivalents for the 2030 Agenda Corpus, and by collecting the collocational patterns of the English lexeme sustainable and its Hungarian and Italian translational equivalents for the SusCorp. The cultural keywords identified in both corpora and for all languages mainly refer to sustainable development and to the sustainability goals recommended by the UN’s 2030 Agenda. Also the international dimension of sustainability is tackled cross-linguistically by cultural keywords in both corpora. In addition, in the SusCorp environmental concerns like climate change feature among the cultural keywords of English and Italian, while Hungarian cultural keywords include issues like migration. The meaning by collocation extracted for the adjective sustainable in both corpora and for all languages makes the lexeme represent a positive quality associated with other positive qualities and characterising material processes of change, depletion, improving and supporting. The meaning by collocation of the noun sustainability in the 2030 Agenda makes the noun a property bound especially to economic matters. The meaning by collocation of sustainable development in the 2030 Agenda makes it a condition that needs to be achieved for the wellbeing of people worldwide thanks to the aid of the UN’s Agenda

Advances in Human-Robot Interaction

Rapid advances in the field of robotics have made it possible to use robots not just in industrial automation but also in entertainment, rehabilitation, and home service. Since robots will likely affect many aspects of human existence, fundamental questions of human-robot interaction must be formulated and, if at all possible, resolved. Some of these questions are addressed in this collection of papers by leading HRI researchers

The linguistic construction of business reasoning: Towards a language-based model of decision-making in undergraduate business

This thesis reports on research whose aim is to arrive at a linguistically theorised understanding of the process of decision-making in undergraduate business studies. The use of ‘real-life’ tasks such as country reports – the major assessment task of the interdisciplinary unit Business in the Global Environment at a metropolitan Australian university – is intended to prepare students for the skills of ‘problem-solving’, ‘decision-making’ and professional report writing in international business environments. However, as indicated by the large number of students failing this task, few students possess the sophisticated linguistic resources necessary to build the generic complexity and persuasive rhetoric this high-stakes task demands. This study is concerned with identifying the linguistic demands of demonstrating decision-making in country reports. Current modelling of ‘big texts’ in SFL (Martin, 1994, 1995) is insufficient for understanding longer texts stretching across the many pages tertiary students are generally required to write. This thesis will show through fine-grained linguistic analyses of High Distinction student assignments that not all ‘big texts’ are macrogenres made up of elemental genre complexes and illustrate that embedded genres play a fundamental role in enabling texts of the length of business country reports to grow bigger than a page. Drawing on discourse semantics (Martin, 1992; Martin & Rose, 2007; Martin & White, 2005), this thesis also will also show how business reasoning is construed in undergraduate business reports through different types of grammatical structures and how successful student writers construct cause-effect relations and three major types of rhetorical moves in these texts. By making visible the academically valued meanings by which skillful writers demonstrate the process of decision-making in undergraduate business country reports, this research has pedagogical implications for academic literacy interventions aimed at making explicit the basis of achievement in business studies. It is hoped that this study will open up future research directions for the continued study of knowledge-building in undergraduate business studies