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A Seminar: "Expressing Causation in English and Japanese: Using Corpora in Contrastive Research"

Sponsored by:
Temple University, Japan Campus (Graduate College of Education), and JALT Tokyo Chapter

Graduate College of Education at Temple University, Japan Campus, and JALT Tokyo Chapter are pleased to announce the following seminar which will be conducted by Dr. Chikako Shigemori Bučar.

Abstract:

The Japanese causative (the affix -(s)ase-, "shieki") is usually taught in the latter half of the beginners level, about the same time when learners are introduced to passive, giving and receiving verbs, various conjunctions to build longer sentences, and so on. Existing sources point out that the learners are not eager to use this causative affix in their production in Japanese. In case of English speaking learners, we may suspect that they lack confidence in using it, since there is no comparable morpheme in their mother tongue. Added to this, the Japanese morpheme -(s)ase- has various functions, i.e. besides causation, it may express non-interference, permission, transitive action etc. Inside Japanese, the causative affix seems to appear more in literary texts, and much less in newspaper articles and/or everyday conversation. Looking at these facts from the standpoint of language learning we must ask following questions:

• Should causative be really taught at beginners' level?
• What is the corresponding expression in learners' mother tongue?

The talk will try to answer these questions based on a contrastive research using corpora.

Speaker (biodata):

Dr. Shigemori-Bučar is Assistant Professor and Vice-Head of the Department of Asian and African Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She teaches Japanese language of all levels, Japanese linguistics, Japanese calligraphy and other subjects. In 1990's she acted as Lecturer of Slovene Language and Japanese Language at J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Since 2004 she is coordinator of the Linguistic Circle of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Her research interests include morphology and syntax of passive, causative, dative phenomena, their application to language teaching, and history of Japanese language teaching. At present, she is a Visiting Researcher at the National Institute for Japanese Language in Tokyo (the 2006 Hakuho Japanese Language Research Fellowship).