Foreword

Abstract

In these strange days of a limited physical and social contact due to the worldwide pandemic we are especially grateful for the existence of the parallel virtual world, which goes beyond human shortcomings. Our work continued without any obstructions and we are pleased to announce the summer ALA issue of the year 2020. In it we offer six research articles that extend over a broad linguistic area and include languages of the far East Asia, namely Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.
 The issue opens with the WU Jiayi’s article “Contextual Conditions and Constraints in Chinese Dangling Topics: Syntax-Discourse Interface Analysis”, in which the author revisits dangling topics in Mandarin Chinese from the semantic and syntactic view, and evolves their findings to the hypothesis concerning language typology.
 The second article on Chinese is Tina ČOK’s “Lexical Aspect Classification for Unrelated Languages: A Case Study on Slovenian and Chinese Lexical Aspect”, in which the author analyzes Chinese and Slovenian verb aspect to show that deeper cognitive differences effect our perception of reality, and upon her findings proposes an upgraded general classification of verb types.
 The following article entitled “The New Chinese Corpus of Literary Texts Litchi” by Mateja PETROVČIČ, Radovan GARABÍK, and Ľuboš GAJDOŠ presents a newly launched corpus of Chinese literary texts Litchi, and exemplifies the variety of its benefits.
 Furthermore, Petra JAKLIN “The Many Meanings of the Japanese Causative:Widening the Pragmatic Take on the -(sa)seru Causative Sentence” is an article in which the author revisits the range of possible interpretations and meanings carried by Japanese causative sentences, and supports her conclusions with comparisons to English and Croatian structures.
 HWANG Yoong Hee’s article “Normative Forms and Synthetic Structure of Japanese in the Incubation Period of L2: Subject to Sentence-final Forms in Longitudinal Discourse Data of Korean Returnee Sisters’ Japanese” focuses on L2 Japanese sentence-final forms and their change mechanism in case of Korean returnees.
 Last but not least, “Examining the Part-of-speech Features in Assessing the Readability of Vietnamese Texts” is an article by An-Vinh LUONG, Diep NGUYEN, and Dien DINH that discusses the present state of research on text readability in Vietnamese and proposes an improved model on estimating readability of texts and consequently their classification.
 
 Editors and Editorial board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration.
 
 Editors