Diachronic and Syncronic Studies on the Interface between Syntactic and Semantic Structures of German

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With the aid of this scientific research, we purchased a Optical Character Reader (OCR), which is especially designed for German researchers. This software enables to read and recognize efficiently such old german fonts as "Fraktur". Y.Hosaka (Tokyo Metropolitan University) was engaged in making all of the texts in "Der Renner" machine-readable as a corpus. This work required not only a good scanner and OCR, but much man-power to postedit all of the texts stored in the computer. As a result, the whole text of "Der Renner" reached a level on which a reasonable quality of concordance can be made. In the fall of 1998, we held a conference at the University of Tokyo (Hongo), where some of our members made reports on the progress of this project. Besides researchers engaged in grammatical theories, cognitive, historical and corpus linguistics made their own contributions to this project and discussed various possibilities of further research cooperations. We came to the conclusion that there should be an interface between syntactic and semantic structures both in view of diachronic and synchronic linguistic studies, which could only be made fruitful by using computational processing. H. Nakagawa's report (Tokyo Metropolitan University) was particularly noteworthy in dealing grammatical constructions referring to corpora we had gathered so far. M.Shigeto (University of Tokyo) made contrastive studies on German and Japanese movement verbs, while K.Koda (University of Tokyo) made an extensive research on interrelations between speech acts and modality in letters written in German and in Japanese. Our project report also includes results of such researches as semantic and syntactic structures, lexical meaning and word formation, diachronic studies with special reference to concordance, descriptions of verb meaning based on current grammatical theories and analysis of German word order with the framework of corpus linguistics.