| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,500,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
|
|---|
| Research Abstract |
In this research program, I have pursued two goals in order to describe the formal, syntactic and semantic rule system of the German language. The first goal is to analyze the basic German verb empirically. The second goal is to examine the method of research theoretically. As for the first purpose, I created some databases of basic German verbs, paying close attention to the semantic categories and the use-frequency of the noun-constituents as combined with the verbs. As for the second goal, consideration was made for the methodology of such research from viewpoints such as "factivity", and the following two conclusions were obtained. The first conclusion is the proposal of a methodical plan where corpora are made the starting point of analysis, since acceptability is the crucial phenomenon of language expressions, At present I am working on (a) the critical proof of prescriptive grammar from linguistic performance and (b) a frequency-in-use investigation of language forms. The second conclusion is the (re-)definition of the object of analysis and the purpose of analysis, based on the observation that "the rule system of language is created by viewpoints, not by the sotalled 'facts' ". I have proposed that the object of analysis should be the aspect of understanding, rather than the aspect of generation in language expressions, and that practicality should be introduced as a concept in purposes, because language hypotheses should be verified from an extralinguistic viewpoint.
I have collected the works relevant to my research program, and compiled these together with new insights into the research report.
|
