Identifying the Genre of a Text through a Multivariate Analysis of the Use of Compound Verbs, and the Application of This to Technical Japanese Education

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The aim of this study is to (1) select compound verbs that are commonly used in academic or specialized papers in different fields; and (2) to demonstrate that it is possible to identify a genre of expository writings by using the compound verbs mentioned in (1) as an index. In so doing, this study is expected to contribute to the body of knowledge on effective teaching methods for Japanese language acquisition, especially to the improvement of teaching methods for specialized lexicon.As a step toward achieving this goal, 395 text samples from three genres were chosen as data Those three genres were: (1) expository writings from five academic sources: papers from Science and Technology; papers from the Journal of the Physical Society of Japan; papers from Japanese Literature; papers from Economics; and pedagogical economics textbooks; (2) modern and contemporary novels; and (3) editorial articles from four major newspapers.The frequencies of occurrences (per sentence) of the 41 selected second verbs of the compound verbs from each sample were tallied and the resultant 395 samples were analyzed through Canonical Discriminant Analysis. From these results, it was found that texts could be classified into their respective genres correctly, at a discriminant rate of 67.1%, by using 15 verbs. The results also showed that compound verbs are less used in the genre of expository writings than in novels and editorial articles. The results further demonstrated that among expository writings, papers from Japanese Literature contained the highest frequencies of occurrences of compound verbs. It was also found that this genre encompasses the most diverse range of compound verbs.Although the data was limited, the findings of this study clearly demonstrate that the second verbs of compound verbs can be employed as an index within Multivariate Analysis.