English Corpus Linguistics in Japan

Book excerpt: The existence of corpus-based linguistic research in Japan has until now mainly been hidden from the view of overseas researchers - partly by the language barrier, and partly by the continuing dominance of generative grammar in Japan. At last, this volume lifts the veil to reveal the current condition of corpus-based research in Japan. English Corpus Linguistics in Japan contains a collection of twenty papers written by Japanese linguists, reflecting the state of art in English corpus linguistics in Japan. The volume covers an impressively wide range, showcasing the diversity and creativity of corpus-based research in this country, from studies drawing on the ‘old faithful’ Brown and LOB Corpora as well as the more recent Frown, FLOB, the Bank of English and the British National Corpus to studies based on more specific historical, literary, spoken, and learner corpora; from investigations of major levels of language description, including prosody, lexis, morphology, syntax, and semantics to investigations of language variation; from explorations of single variables to those of multivariant dimensions; and from pedagogical applications to software applications. The papers are grouped into four sections: 1) Corpus-based studies of contemporary English, 2) Historical and diachronic studies of English, 3) English corpora and English language teaching, 4) Software for analyzing corpora. This volume will inspire still further corpus explorations in the future both in Japan and abroad.