Time and Space in Contemporary Japanese through Comparative Investigation of Japanese and English Mental Lexicon Structures and Strategies of Temporal and Spatial Description

2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 21K12977
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 02060:Linguistics-related
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: Telegina Maria 東京大学, 東京カレッジ, 特任助教 (80870071)
• Project Period (FY): 2021-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: Japanese linguistics / Linguistics / Temporal / Spatial / Mental Lexicon

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In this project, we collected data from corpora and word associations and analysed as networks. Our findings confirmed previous results that a semantic network based on corpora differs from one based on word associations. These networks represent different dimensions of time and space concepts; word associations represent socio-cultural knowledge and corpus represents the ways we write and speak about time and space. The word association data collection yielded over 750,000 responses, aiding our investigation of the mental lexicon. Preliminary results of the analysis revealed various concepts of time and space, from abstract notions to specific references such as calendars. Our ongoing exploration of time and space description has led to a discovery. We've identified a pattern based on temae/oku or closer to the speaker/further away dimensions, which has previously been unexplored in studies on space in Western languages.

Free Research Field

Linguistics

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

Understanding the temporal and spatial concepts of language and culture is crucial for learning how native speakers perceive and position themselves in the world. This study helps in comprehending modern-day Japan language from within the scope of cognitive linguistics.