Distant Collocations between Suppositional Adverbs and Clause-Final Modality Forms in Japanese Language Corpora

Co-occurring of modal adverbs and clause-final modality forms in the Japanese language exhibits a strong agreement-like behaviour. We refer to such co-occurrences as distant collocations a notion that warrants further consideration within the fields of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. In this paper we concentrate on a set of suppositional adverbs and investigate the kinds of clause-final modality forms that they frequently cooccur with. One group of adverbs is found to typically collocate with one group of modality forms (one modality type) to a high degree, but also co-occurs with other modality types. Analyzing a variety of corpora revealed that associations between certain adverbs and certain modality types are indeed a matter of degree, although the associations in some cases vary across different genres. The results are summarized with the help of cluster analysis. We believe that the basic analysis approaches in this paper can be extended to cover similar kinds of collocational behaviour within lexicons and other large-scale knowledge resources, as well as complementing the development of computerassisted language learning systems.