Kawaguchi Y., Takagaki T., Tomimori N., Tsuruga Y. (eds.) Corpus-Based Perspectives in Linguistics

Издательство John Benjamins Publishing, 2007, -450 pp.The 21st Century COE Program began in 2002 as a policy focus of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, and Science and Technology. The objective of this program is to create world-class centers for research and education in many different disciplines at Japanese universities to raise the level of research and to foster the growth of creative individuals. The program is aimed at turning our universities into unique, internationally competitive institutions.
The Tokyo University of Foreign Studies proposed programs in the humanities, and interdisciplinary and combined fields, and new disciplines. In each of these two fields, one of our programs was selected. In the humanities field the program selected was the Center of Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics (UBLI), which all of you are participating in today. In interdisciplinary and combined fields and new disciplines, the Center for Documentation and Area-Transcultural Studies (CDATS) was chosen.
The UBLI program was originally created to combine the rapidly advancing fields of computer science, linguistics, and language education, to create a new discipline called linguistic informatics. The program is building this area of study by gathering and analyzing vast amounts of linguistic usage data to reveal how language is actually used, and apply this new knowledge to language education.
At the same time, we are educating graduate students to be highly knowledgeable in phonetics and linguistics, and skilled in computer technology; through surveys, evaluations, and analyses of resources on the Internet, work to develop the TUFS Language Modules, and analysis and processing of multi-language corpora, they gain a deep understanding of language resource information. We also train our graduate students as fieldworkers by encouraging them to do on-site language field surveys.
For our university, the UBLI program presented many new challenges that we had never faced before. As I mentioned before one of these was in our work to bring the fields of linguistics, language education, and computer science together in linguistic informatics. The second challenge was to gain the co-operation and participation of many professors, researchers, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers. We were fortunate to have strong support from researchers inside and outside the institution, including many from overseas.
The third challenge was to increase the international profile of our research activities. This was achieved through extensive participation in international symposia and workshops, and presentations by our graduate students and postdoctoral researchers at international conferences. The publication of a book series based on the program’s research from the John Benjamins Publishing Company in Holland is more proof of our effort in this area.
The development of the TUFS Language Modules was a fourth challenge. We publish the results of our research quickly on the web, and seek the opinions of foreign language educators from outside the university. This cycle has been used to improve our modules.
And the fifth challenge was in our graduate education. More than ever before, we have worked hard to use research as the way to educate our graduate students.
By striving to overcome each of these challenges, the UBLI program has produced many benefits in both research and education. These achievements were possible only with the superb and devoted leadership of Professor Yuji Kawaguchi, and the endless effort of our professors, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. The university is extremely proud of all of them.
The five-year first stage of the UBLI program will end next March. Although it may be difficult to sustain the same level of funding that has been provided by the government, the university is committed to maintaining funding and supporting further research in the future, to maintain and further develop the program’s activities.Message from the President
Foundations of Center of Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics (UBLI)1. Workshop on Corpus Linguistics. Research DomainLinguistic Atlases. Objectives, Methods, Results, Prospects
From the Linguistic Atlas to the Database, and vice versa. The Corsican Example
A Usage-based French Dictionary of Collocations
Corpus of Old French Literary Texts
Building a Large Corpus for Phonological Research. The PFC Project
Collateral Languages and Digital Corpus
Parallel and Comparable Corpora. The State of Play
First Language & Second Language Writing Development of Elementary Students. Two Perspectives
The Uneasy Interface. Methodological Issues in Using Data from Traditional and Urban Dialectology in (Re-)constructing Sociolinguistic History
A Corpus of French Texts with Non-standard Orthography
Resources and Tools for Old French Text Corpora2. Corpus Linguistics in Linguistic InformaticsTransitive Direct, Transitive Indirect and Pronominal Verb Constructions in French. The Case of approcher
Demonstratives in De Bello Gallico and Li Fet des Romains. A Parallel Corpus Approach to Medieval Translation
Patient-Orientedness in Resultative Compound Verbs in Chinese
Corpus Research in Chinese and Its Application to Chinese Language Teaching. A Case of Localizers in Chinese
Rhetorical Questions with Interrogative Markers in Nanai
Vacillation in the Selection of Complementizers of Malay Transitive Verbs
Voice in Relative Clauses in Malay. A Comparison of Written and Spoken Language
Testing the Primacy of Aspect and Reverse Order Hypothesis in Japanese Returnees. Towards Constructing a Corpus of Second Language Attrition Data
Corpus-based Analysis of Lexical Errors of Advanced Japanese Learners
Syntactic Patterns of Intrasentential Code-Switching in the Discourse of Japanese-English Bilingual Families