A Study on Logical Structure of a Text by using Selected Sentence Patterns and its application to Teaching Japanese as a foreign language

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It is quite important for advanced students of Japanese-Language for Specific Purposes to understand the underlying logical structure of the text. Since the logical structure will enhance an ability to read and write technical papers.Such items as the sentence patterns can provide important clues for understanding the logical structure of the text. The ultimate goal of this study is to clarify the logical structures of the technical texts in Japanese by focusing on the functions of the selected sentence patterns. As a step toward achieving this objective, we chose 132 text samples of six genres. Those six genres are (i) an introductory economics textbook, (ii) papers of the Journal of the Physical Society of Japan, (iii) papers of science and technology, (iv) papers of Japanese literature, (v) editorial articles of 4 kinds of newspapers, and (vi) modern novels. We counted the rate of appearance (per sentence) of the 62 selected sentence patterns of each sample. The analysis was conducted in the following two steps, (a) We first examined univariate distribution of the above 62 items and then applied the canonical discriminant analysis to 132 samples ((i) 16 samples (ii) 24 samples (iii) 14 samples (iv) 24 samples (v) 40 samples selected by random-sampling out of 222 (vi) 14 samples). (b) Secondly we applied the same method to 3 samples (i.e. (ii), (iii) and (iv)) which were belonged to the same genre, so-called "technical papers" in the first step.According to the result obtained (a), these genres are classified with 14 sentence patterns (out of 62) at a high apparent correct classification rate (80%), Following to the result obtained (b), the words which distinguished 3 genres were clearly selected. These results indicate the existence of common sentence patterns in texts having an explicit logical structure.