Summary

This project is designing a "Corpus of Modern Japanese" to complement the "Design of a Diachronic Corpus" project, which targets the period between ancient times and early modern times, leading to a "Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese." Based on the Taiyo Corpus created by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics and on digitized texts of Modern Japanese, the project will create a prototype "Corpus of Modern Japanese" and use it to develop methods for corpus studies of modern Japanese. The project will also develop a list of important documents, examine the method of selecting documents for the corpus, and study methods of structuring the language of the corpus and analyzing it morphologically. This project will advance the research to the stage where subsequent projects can start the actual construction of the "Corpus of Modern Japanese."