類義語の研究

執筆: 松尾拾, 西尾寅彌, 田中章夫The Japanese language has so many words of foreign origin, especially kango (Chinese borrowings), that almost every day we face problems of synonyms. We tried in this study to consider various phases of synonyms and to make a general survey of synonymic problems.In the former part, we laid a stress on the meanings and feelings of the words, and surveyed the following points through opinionnaires:1. Differences in objective meaning between synonymous words (e.g., mori/hayasi ‘woody place\u27), and degrees of agreement among people with regard to the differences.2. Differences of emotive meaning between close synonyms (e.g., zyosei/huzin ‘woman\u27), and degrees of agreement among people with regard to the differences. Which word do they select from among synonyms in a given situation, and what are the factors affecting the selection? What are the differences between young and old people concerning commonly used words within synonym sets (e.g., sekken/syabon ‘soap\u27)?As a result of the survey, we found that the proper use of synonyms is common, but that there are inevitably some divergencies among individuals about the meanings of words; as for emotive meaning, however, we found larger degrees of agreement among people with respect to the differences between synonyms than we had expected.For the latter part of the paper, about the problems of synonyms, we took up cases causing discussion in mass-communication circles today, and examined why they have come into question. We made sure, by questionnaires, of some important points of the problems caused by the flood of loan words and the ambiguity of homonymic synonyms. We found that importation of loan words, often ambiguous in meaning, through diverse channels, causes Japanese to possess many synonyms, and that homonymic synonyms are used properly in some points, with a clear consciousness of their meanings, and at other points, not. This information may be considered as basic for a rearrangement of the Japanese vocabulary.The book has a list of homonymic synonyms containing 1,422 items. This study was carried out by MATUO Osamu, NISIO Toraya and TANAKA Akio

電子計算機による新聞の語彙調査

[Studies on the vocabulary of modern newspapers Vol. 1-4 (Reports 37, 38, 42, 48)]These books report on a vocabulary survey conducted using one year of publication (1966) of three newspapers: Asahi, Mainiti, and Yomiuri as a population.The main characteristics of this investigation are as follows:(1) Newspaper articles were selected by a sampling procedure to obtain a large corpus totalling three million running words.(2) In order to process such a large amount of data in a short period of time, a computer system and Chinese character input-output teletypewriters were used.(3) By using both a long unit (Tyô-tan\u27i, roughly, a word) and a short unit (Tan-tan\u27i, roughly, a morpheme), it was possible to investigate word structure during the processing.(4) In order to obtain and interpret the results from a multidimensional viewpoint, the occurrence and use of words were determined and analyzed in terms of various types of articles by topic, type of discourse, location of unit, and source of information.This project is the first one of its kind in which a computer was used in processing the data at the National Language Research Institute. We conducted this survey using a computer to carry out a variety of quantitative analyses involved in the processing of the large quantity of data in a short period of time.Report 37 (Vol. 1) contains a vocabulary table in order of frequency of occurrence of long and short units, and a vocabulary table in order of the Japanese 50-kana syllabary. Report 38 (Vol.2) contains a table of loan words in order of frequency of occurrence, a vocabulary table in order of frequency of use by parts of speech, a vocabulary table of short units in order of the Japanese 50-kana syllabary, a vocabulary table of homophones, and a vocabulary table of homomorphemes. Report 42 (Vol. 3) contains a table of NA-adjectives, a table of the connections made by affixes, and a table of the connections made by particles and auxiliary verbs. Reports 37 (Vol. 1), 38 (Vol. 2) and 42 (Vol. 3) are all interim reports. Report 48 (Vol. 4) is the final report for this survey and contains a vocabulary table in order of word frequency and a vocabulary table in order of the Japanese 50-kana syllabary for the long units (approximately 2,000,000 running words and approximately 190,000 different words).ÔISI Hatutarô, HAYASI Ôki, HAYASI Sirô, ISIWATA Tosio, SAITÔ Hidenori, KIMURA Sigeru, TANAKA Akio, MINAMI Huzio, EGAWA Kiyosi, NAKANO Hirosi, TUTIYA Sin\u27iti, NOMURA Masaaki, MURAKI Sinzirô, and TURUOKA Akio directed this survey