Kanza Tariq

Kanza Tariq did her Bachelors in Science from the University of Alberta and was enrolled in the Japanese Linguistics Masters Program, under the supervision of Professor Tsuyoshi Ono. Her research primarily involved discourse data and she was working the "fuzzy boundaries" between categories in grammar and, in particular, how Japanese adjective are conjugated by native Japanese speakers during internet discourse. Japanese has two kinds of adjectives which, by English learners of Japanese, are called i-adjectives and na-adjectives and each is conjugated differently. However, in Internet discourse, native speakers of Japanese sometimes use what is considered the na-adjective conjugation when conjugating i-adjectives. For example:

海外からのお客様も多いでした

There were lots of foreign customers as well

A previous pilot study suggested that the acceptability of the phenomenon differs between adjectives according to number of mora, frequency of use and also depending on the kind of website the discourse appears on. Her research was focused on establishing whether there is a continuum in how acceptable this unorthodox use is among native speakers according to the frequency of use of the adjective.