Compilation of a Corpus of Translated Works of the Mid-Meiji Era and Its Quantitative Analysis

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25770178
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Japanese linguistics
• Research Institution: National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Konishi Hikari 大学共同利用機関法人人間文化研究機構国立国語研究所, コーパス開発センター, プロジェクト非常勤研究員 (30646592)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 文体 / 近代口語体 / 言文一致体 / 翻訳小説 / コーパス

Outline of Final Research Achievements

We compiled a corpus of six translated works of the mid-Meiji era and one of each from the late Meiji and Taisyo eras.
This research provides an overview of the corpus and the findings of the statistic survey conducted, such as the length of sentence, the similarity between the works, and so on. The survey shows that there are no significant differences between the two sets of works in the number of bunsetsus in a sentence, the rate of POS tagging, Modifier Verb Ratio (MVR), or in their cosine similarities. The quantitative results indicate the similarities between the translated works of the mid-Meiji era and those of the late Meiji and Taisyo eras. It also supports the assumption that the colloquial style had already become familiar through translation works and read by people of the mid-Meiji era. However, as an exception, statistics show that the variance of the conjunctive postposition in a sentence tends to decrease with the passage of time.

Free Research Field

日本語学