Identifying discourse-pragmatic characteristics of "Japanese English" as an international language.

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This research aims to detect, if any, distinctive discourse-pragmatic features in the English written by Japanese professional "users" of English. The main research question is, "What, if any, are differences in the use of English between Japanese professionals and native speakers of English?" To attain this objective, this author compiled a Japanese User Corpus of English (JUCE), currently a one-million-word corpus of various news articles written by Japanese journalists (Fujiwara, 2014) and compared it with a similar set of Inner Circle linguistic data such as corpora and a wordlist. In a series of analyses, it was found that 1) "Japanese English" potentially has some characteristics such as (1) more repeated use of content nouns with the definite articles and less use of personal pronouns, and (2) more use of obligatory modals, "should" and "must." These two features can be regarded as "pragmatic" ones in the sense that they are more directly influenced by recipients of the message.