Cohesion in Japanese ArticleFocusing on the Articles in the “dokkai” of Japanese Language Proficiency Test First and Second Level

• Main Authors: Ya-Wen Tsai, 蔡雅雯
• Other Authors: Fong-Chi Tsai
• Format: Others
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/kb59kb

碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 應用日語學系碩士班 === 95 === When we read a Japanese textbook, a newspaper article, a magazine, or a letter, the ability to understand the whole reading is necessary. How to understand reading content is a topic which interests many Japanese researchers, Japanese teachers, and learners. It is useful for reading and understanding to clarify article structure by article analysis. Using the articles in the “dokkai” (reading-grammar section) of Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), we can clarify a characteristic of Japanese article structure by analyzing how a writer connects sentences to make what he wants to communication into an article. In addition, we can clarify common points and differences among articles of each level by comparing articles of different levels. In this study, the idea and analysis method of “cohesion” of Halliday & Hasan (1976) is used to clarify the way connecting sentences work to assemble an article. Some tendencies of Japanese article structure were clarified from this analysis. The investigation shows that the first-level and the second-level articles are found to have overwhelming use of “lexical” which exceeds total 70%. From this fact, we can understand that “lexical” plays a very important role to connect one sentence with another. Overall, the use of “substitution” does not reach 10%. We can say that there is little use of “substitution” for connecting sentences in Japanese. A tendency of Japanese article structure was also indicated from this analysis. That is, “personal pronouns” are not used very much, but ellipsis of the subject is. Through these results, we can gain clearer understanding of some characteristics of Japanese structure.