Construction of a database for the correct and incorrect use of considerate expressions, for the formation of a Japanese considerate expression dictionary

Professor Masaki Yamaoka, based at the Department of Humanities, Faculty of Letters, Soka University in Japan is leading a highly collaborative and multidisciplinary team that features researchers from academic institutions around the world, with a view to clarifying the actual situation of considerate expressions. It is hoped that this will make real contributions to anthropological fields that provide a more complete picture of what it means to be human. Some considerate expressions are common to all languages, while others are unique to a specific language. One that is common to many languages is the use of 'maybe' and 'may' which have the effect of making what is said less forceful or certain. By being less emphatic, it is thought that a consideration for the other person's feelings is sometimes part of the language process. It is a usage called 'hedge' in linguistics. For example, in English, 'it might be better to' is a kind of hedge. We can use this phrase as a considerate expression like that 'it might be better to leave here' instead of 'Leave here.' It is worth bearing in mind that, until now, research into considerate expressions has almost exclusively been conducted with researchers rather than the general public. Laboratory conditions can have the effect of providing an incomplete picture, so Yamaoka wants to make the research more reliable by collecting data on the actual usage of considerate expressions by members of the general public. A large-scale corpus of written and spoken language has already been developed in Japanese, Professor Yamaoka in the process of collecting as many examples of considerate expressions as possible and storing them in the database. The Japanese considerate expression dictionary can be composed by selecting information which is beneficial to Japanese learners from the database. In addition, Professor Yamaoka would also like to publish this database among researchers for the convenience of those who are engaged in research on considerate expressions in the future.