Vocabulary depends on topic, and so does grammar

Abstract This paper examines the topic-specific words extracted from a contact-situation conversation corpus of Japanese. The corpus that was analyzed contains 38 original Skype conversation sessions of 9 pairs of Japanese learners and native speakers on preselected topics. After manually dividing the entire corpus (approximately 200,000 words) into 13 subcorpora by topic, many substantial words and some function words were extracted as topic-specific. Although previous research has suggested that function words are not topic-dependent, this study shows that Japanese function words do, in fact, have a tendency of occurrence. For example, tense and aspect markers occur frequently for the topic “pop-culture,” while nominative markers and existential sentences occur for the topic “town.” This tendency may represent a fundamental resource for developing materials and textbook for both topic-based ones and grammar-structural ones.