Creation of a Magazine Corpus for Analyzing Nouns Used as Classifiers in Modern Japanese

2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19K13184
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 02060:Linguistics-related
• Research Institution: Osaka University (2020-2023); Mejiro University (2019)
• Principal Investigator: TOJO Kana 大阪大学, 大学院人文学研究科(人文学専攻、芸術学専攻、日本学専攻), 講師 (20782220)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: 名詞 / 助数詞 / コーパス / 準助数詞 / 擬似助数詞 / 雑誌 / 新聞

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The objective of this study was to examine the nouns used as classifiers. These nouns are commonly used in formal written language, but there are no other sources that can be studied over time, other than newspapers. Therefore, a new corpus of magazines was created for this study, which differs from the year of publication included in the BCCWJ. In parallel, an analysis of the characteristics of 'nouns used as classifiers' was also conducted.
For the creation of the magazine corpus, a plain corpus of 850,000 characters was created by sampling magazines published in 2015. In the feature analysis, in addition to a survey of the journal corpus in the BCCWJ, In addition, an analysis was carried out of the directive function within sentences, an analysis by semantic domain to which individual words belong, and an investigation focusing on how words that do not function as numeral classifires are used as noun phrases.

Free Research Field

現代日本語学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

数詞に続いて用いられる名詞には、「4項目挙げる」の「項目」のように、助数詞として定着している語（準助数詞）のほか、「4閣僚を更迭」の「閣僚」のように、ものを数え上げるためには使われない語（擬似助数詞）も含まれる。本研究ではこれらを「名詞の助数詞的用法」として包括的に扱うことで、従来の研究ではほとんど扱われなかった新たな数量表現である擬似助数詞の語彙的・構文的な特徴を示すことができた。また、BCCWJよりも新しい発行年の雑誌を対象として電子化を行った。計画当初よりも小規模となったため、単純な比較は難しいが、語彙表や資料の特性の公開を通して、言語資源の蓄積に貢献することが可能になると考えている。