The analysis for the phenomenon that prepositions may or may not undergo the third tone sandhi in Mandarin in Zhang (1997) is reviewed. She considers that this phenomenon is short of sound coverage and couches her analysis in the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). However, upon scrutiny, Zhang’s analysis invites unnecessary questions. The postulation of two “constituent strength” constraints is with no foundation. It is difficult to grab the idea behind the constituent-strength concept even till now. Related to the concept, the non-specification of a prepositional phrase is not clear. Instead, the syntactic feature manifestation could mark a preposition’s uniqueness. In addition, the misuse of the Generalized Alignment and stipulations toward the evaluations in OT are spotted, too. My synthetic approach, based on the extant and developing knowledge about constituency, PF merger, and Shih’s (1997) foot formation, shows that for this phenomenon, no new device is needed.

Mandarin --- third tone sandhi --- PF merger

The Internet can have a strong influence on students learning the Japanese language in Slovenia, as well as in other parts of Europe. Almost all freshmen have come into contact with Japanese pop culture via the Internet. The aim of this paper is to discuss the teacher’s role in overcoming certain problems associated with learning the Japanese language in the age of the Internet. First, looking at a general survey of the current situation surrounding teaching Japanese language in Slovenia, we identify the advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet when learning the language. However, the disadvantages of the Internet that lead to learner problems are, in fact, the problems that we also face in daily communication. So, as a teacher, I propose following three strategies to lead the learner: first, let the learner’s interests stimulate him to explore a wider and deeper world; second, lead the learner to reconstruct his world; and third, lead the learner to self expression so that he can be understood by the listener and improve his communication skills. Such are teacher’s strategies for interactive communication based on individual standpoint versus a world view, which has emerged in teaching Japanese language when the learner seeks language skills not solely for practical purposes as in Slovenia. Considering this, I additionally propose for Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) ideology that those strategies aim to achieve “an expertise of the relationship with the Other” (Zarate, Gohard-Radenkovic, Lussier, & Penz. 2004, p. 11).

The Internet --- language teaching --- teacher’s role --- socio-cultural proficiency --- CEFR

In this paper, we present results of an evaluation of Japanese word sketches and address in detail issues that were observed by the evaluators. A word sketch presents a list of salient collocates of a word, organized by the grammatical relations holding between the word and its collocate. The word sketch functionality is incorporated into the Sketch Engine corpus query system and has been created for more than twenty languages so far, including Japanese. The issues that have been discovered in the evaluation of word sketches in Japanese are to be addressed for further enhancement of the word sketch functionality. Other tools and resources which are combined for use and influence the performance of the word sketches should also be looked over. We divide the issues into the following: 1) the lemmatizer and tagger in use, 2) the sketch grammar that is specifically written for Japanese, and 3) the corpus and statistical methods.

word sketches --- Japanese collocations --- evaluation --- corpus --- language technologies