Foreword

Abstract

The present issue of ALA, the second in its new incarnation, brings two pieces of good news. The first is that it is now also included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), besides Open J-Gate and Google Scholar. The second is that in 2014, the Department of Asian and African Studies of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana is going to host the 14th conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies.

The focus of this issue is on Chinese and Japanese. Papers devoted to Chinese are more theoretically oriented. In the first paper, David Ta-Chun SHEN argues about which theoretical devices are sufficient to explain the phenomenon in Mandarin where prepositions may or may not undergo the third tone sandhi. The second paper, by Jens KARLSSON, deals with adverbs zai and you in Modern Standard Chinese, showing the similarities of semantic content between the two adverbs and pointing out the main difference between them, i.e. the difference in viewpoint, and possible consequences of this fact.

On the other hand, papers devoted to Japanese look at various issues from an applied linguistic perspective. Nagisa MORITOKI, based on her experience of teaching Japanese in Slovenia, discusses the learner and the teacher’s role and their possible strategies when dealing with the vast treasure-trove of information available on the Internet.

Next, Bor HODOŠČEK explores genre variation in the newest large-scale modern Japanese language corpus, the BCCWJ, and the usability of modifier-verb ratio as a genre classifier. In the last paper, Irena SRDANOVIĆ and co-authors discuss the issues involved in creating Japanese language word sketches, singling out in particular the lemmatizer, the tagger, the corpus and statistical methods used, and the sketch grammar that is specifically written for Japanese.

In this issue’s Book Review, Mateja PETROVČIČ reviews the work by Xiaoqin SU on reflexivity in Chinese, Reflexivität im Chinesischen: Eine IntegrativeAnalyse.