The on-line full-text database of the Minutes of the Diet:
Its potentials and limitations

by Kenjiro Matsuda

The on-line full-text database of the Minutes of the Diet offers linguists a unique resource for corpora study of the modern Japanese language; with all the debates and information of the session searchable by keywords, and the name of the speaker, date, House, etc., all laid out in an easy-to-use interface. The database is accessible from ordinary internet browsers, and the search results are easily downloadable to the user's PC. This article explores this resource's possibilities for various linguistic research (lexicon, syntax, dialectology and discourse analysis), demonstrates actual searches and their results, and carefully examines the limitations that necessarily arise from several sources (e.g. editorial practices of the Diet Office transcribers).