15. A corpus-based analysis of some time-related aspects of contemporary Japanese

Corpora with temporal information enable us to observe and analyze time-related aspects of language. Here we will discuss two types of such case studies involving the Japanese language. In the first half of the article, we will analyze diachronic changes of the grammar and expressions of contemporary Japanese based upon the texts of the minutes of the National Diet of Japan. In the second half, we will use texts of daily newspapers in order to observe the ways in which the use of vocabulary items may change during the course of the year.