Lexis Eight

1.    Style

So it appears we come back to this again. ‘Style,’ which I can’t help but feel is very much like pornography – no-one can really define it, but we all know it when we see it.

“They are used for stylistic variation… [t]his can be problematic for learners, particularly where their first language does not use stylistic (elegant) variation to the same extent.”

Lexis Seven

1. He sleeps like a baby 

He wakes up screaming every three hours having pissed himself.

Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress…

Lexis Six

Right. This all strikes me as very important and useful. I have, however, yet to work out exactly how. Bear with me.

1.    On the Ground and In the Air

“…there is room for work here too on going beyond simply statistical accounts of collocation, and trying to explain why words co-occur.”

No shit. Not ‘room’ so much vast open prairies stretching to the horizon and beyond so your view of open space is only limited by the curvature of the earth, for work.

Lexis Five

1.    I’mfinethankyouandyou?

Ah, here we go. Now we really get to the meat of it.

I don’t think Japanese (the language or people) is/are necessarily any more formal than English (the language or people). There does seem though to be a greater willingness to acknowledge and codify the formalities, and thus introduce more explicit ‘rules’ governing behaviour and communication that we might be expected to understand more implicitly in the UK. Maybe.

Lexis Four

A bit more hands on, this one. If a largely theoretical exercise can be ‘hands on’. You know what I mean.

Either way, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to slightly sarcastic extemporizing in the usual way, so this’ll be short. Just a couple of quick points.

Lexis Three

1.    ¡Hasta el infinito, y más allá! 

In Japan the traffic lights are ‘blue’ despite there being a separate word for ‘green’, and the sun is red not yellow. It’s right there on the flag.

So those “perceivable differences.” The question is, ‘perceived by who(m)?’ I’m sure we’ve all had discussions of various levels of heatedness with friends, sales clerks, and shopping buddies over whether a particular item of clothing is black or just very very dark blue. How much are those perceptions cultural (the red sun in Japan), linguistic (yellow most everywhere else), or individual (Newton, of course, spoke of ‘white’ light)? How do they feed up and down? If a word holds a meaning simply because a critical mass of people thinks that it does, then whose ‘perception’ really matters?

Lexis Two

1.    Where Wings Take Dream

Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat? I’ll dig it out and put some thoughts up soon.

* * * * *

              “Search your memory for a few such mistakes… How do you explain these occurrences?”

Alcohol.

Lexis One

1.    Mairzy Doats

There are essentially three alphabets in Japanese – except they’re not really alphabets, but anyway: hiragana, which is your basic phonic syllabary and of which there are about fifty; katakana, which is the same but used broadly as italics are used in English and of which there are also about fifty; and kanji, which are the famous ideograms (not really ideograms) people get tattooed on their shoulders in the mistaken belief that they say ‘brave warrior’ when they actually say ‘discombobulated chicken’. School students are expected to remember about 2000 ‘daily use kanji’ but estimates of their total number usually hover around 6000.

There are no word breaks in standard written Japanese. As someone whose ability with the language hovers between ‘functional’ and ‘conversational’ depending upon alcohol consumption, this can cause me problems. Although frankly everything about the language causes problems but that’s for another time, perhaps.