Epistemological potential of target texts: a case study of the Russian-Japanese parallel fiction corpus

Abstract

This paper discusses the possibility of using a parallel text corpus to study grammatical issues of the target language, and the epistemological value of target texts is argued. Parallel text corpora are more often used in their comparative aspect, even though they have a significant content and epistemological potential for the systematization of linguistic knowledge about the target language as well. This work, carried out as a part of a general study of Japanese agentivity, describes an attempt to research the corpus material to identify recurrent patterns in the target language and to determine the distribution regularities of agentive features in Japanese. This paper was carried out using the material from the author’s parallel Russian-Japanese corpus of fiction texts. The main criterion used to collect this dataset is the markedness of sentences with inanimate subjects, which is imposed by such cognitive and cultural factors as the linguistic and social subject-object hierarchy: human beings, as the highest creatures on the animacy scale, could not be affected by an inanimate subject. The set of grammatically non-identical components of the syntactic structure of the source and target texts identified in the material of the corpus became the starting point for a detailed analysis of the mechanism for distributing syntactic and semantic roles in a Japanese sentence.

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