Summary

The aim of the project is to compile a handbook of usage of basic verbs in Japanese for JFL (Japanese as foreign language) learners. Verbs as predicators are one of the crucial components which determine the skeleton of a sentence, which serves as a basic unit of communication. In this project we focus on the basic verbs which are frequently used in day-to-day conversation and aim to develop a new framework for compilation of a handbook of usage of basic verbs in Japanese by integrating state-of-the-art insights from various related fields such as Theoretical Linguistics, Japanese Linguistics, Japanese Language Pedagogy, Linguistic Typology, Contrastive Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. The envisaged end product of the project is a set of small-scale bi-lingual handbooks such as Japanese-Chinese, Japanese-English, Japanese-Korean and Japanese-Marathi, compiled adopting the framework developed in the project.

In order to achieve the aforementioned goal, research meetings and symposia will be periodically held. These meetings and symposia will be open to the public. The output of the joint research will be presented and published domestically as well as internationally. Further, with a view to making a contribution to Japanese language education around the globe, the results of the joint research will be converted into a database and made available online for free access.