Japanese Lexicon Research Articles

Jōyō kanji as core building blocks of the Japanese writing system

The architecture of writing systems metaphor has special relevance for understanding the structural nature of the Japanese writing system, and, more specifically, for appreciating how the 2,136 kanji of the 常用漢字表 /jō-yō-kan-ji-hyō/* ‘List of characters for general use’ function as the core building blocks in the orthographic representation of a considerable proportion of the Japanese lexicon. In seeking to illuminate the multiple layers of internal structure within Japanese kanji, the Japanese lexicon, and the Japanese writing system, the paper draws on insights and observations gained from an ongoing project to construct a large-scale Japanese lexical database system. Reflecting structural distinctions within the database, the paper consists of three main sections addressing the different structural levels of kanji components, jōyō kanji, and the lexicon. Keywords: Japanese writing system; building blocks; jōyō kanji; components; orthographic structure; database

The Special Lexicon of the Secret Language of Thieves in Japan between the Edo and Showa Periods

Drawing on a corpus of 300 words, this paper analyses the linguistic characteristics of the special lexicon of the secret language (ingo) used by thieves in Japan between the Edo and Showa periods. A total of 189 words are illustrated to demonstrate how the secret language of thieves can be described in terms of the three strategies used to create this special lexicon: 1) semantic changes introduced into the pre-existing Japanese lexicon; 2) lexical innovations; and 3) morpho-phonological modifications of the pre-existing Japanese lexicon. Strategies used in the creation of the special lexicon are examined in order to determine how the strategies employed in thieves’ ingo conform to or deviate from the strategies used in modernising the lexicon of Standard Japanese. This paper also examines how morphological processes utilised in the special lexicon of thieves’ secret language interact with Japanese phonology, and concludes that the mora is an indispensable unit for the processes of truncation, hypocoristic formation and reduplication, while the syllable is an indispensable unit for the process of metathesis. Finally, data analysis reveals that truncation and metathesis work at a level which ignores morpheme boundaries, and operate instead at the level of the mora and syllable respectively.

日本語テクスチャー用語の体系化と官能評価への利用

日本語テクスチャー用語の体系化と官能評価への利用

À propos de mono en japonais : considérations sémantico-référentielles dans une approche contrastive avec le mot chose

Although it belongs to the fundamental Japanese lexicon, the noun mono (thing) and its denotative use has been little studied in contrast with the great amount of research on its grammaticalized uses. On the basis of observation of its referents from a corpus of more than 300 occurrences, we will focus here on its semantico-referential characteristics in a contrastive approach with the French word chose analysed by Kleiber (1987, 1994). This approach will enable us to identify some fundamental semantic features, similarities and differences with the word chose and also to better understand certain constraints of usage. We will see finally that in a certain number of apparently denotative uses, the meaning is actually brought up by the verbal predicate and mono is finally only a discrete physical support. This requalification of certain marginal usages in syntagmatic components will lead us to a better definition of its prototypic referent.

CONFLICTED ATTITUDES TOWARD HERITAGE

During their more than 100-year-long presence in Peru, Japanese descendants (Nikkei) have been linguistically integrated into Peruvian society. The portion of the population that speaks Japanese in daily life has been decreasing dramatically, and the majority of younger Nikkei typically grow up speaking mainly Spanish, mixed with a specific Japanese lexicon that has been transmitted intergenerationally within families. To prevent the complete loss of ancestral language and cultural traits, private all-day elementary and secondary schools, founded and run by the Nikkei, have been offering additional Japanese language educational programs. Drawing from an ethnographic study at one such Nikkei-sponsored secondary school in Lima, this article portrays the students’ inconsistent and ambiguous attitudes toward learning Japanese as their heritage. More specifically, the article focuses on returnee students from Japan, a recently emerged diaspora group of youngsters who have spent time in Japan as emigrants and then returned to resettle in Peru. The article examines the returnees’ negotiations with the language teachers regarding what is considered to be “proper” or “standard” Japanese. Classroom observations and interviews with both teachers and students demonstrate how contested the “heritage” of heritage language education is—defined as it is through social, economic, and political positions and interests of participants in the educational process. The study also shows how the institutionalized heritage language education at school sometimes results in encouraging the students to “dis-inherit” what they have learned outside school: this may relate to their family's social status in their ancestral country.

Phonosemantic Evidence for the Mimetic Stratum in the Japanese Lexicon

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Development of the ability to lexically encode novel second language phonemic contrasts

Second language (L2) learners must often learn to perceive and produce novel L2 phoneme contrasts. Although both research and intuition suggest that these difficulties can be overcome to some extent with exposure to the L2, it is not known what consequences this kind of learning has for the phonological structure of the L2 lexicon. We present an experiment designed to investigate the lexical representations that learners establish for L2 words that contain novel phonemic contrasts. Specifically, we consider the acquisition of Japanese consonant length contrasts by native speakers of English: Japanese contrasts consonants such as /k/ and /kk/ while English does not. The results indicate that native English speakers do not initially encode consonant length consistently in their lexical representations of Japanese words, as reflected in both listening and production tasks. However, after one year of Japanese experience, the phonological structure of their Japanese lexicon more closely approximates that of native Japanese speakers. We conclude that significant changes to the structure of the L2 lexicon can occur even within the first year of L2 learning.

An analysis of a high-performance japanese question answering system

Twenty-five Japanese Question Answering systems participated in NTCIR QAC2 subtask 1. Of these, our system SAIQA-QAC2 performed the best: MRR = 0.607. SAIQA-QAC2 is an improvement on our previous system SAIQA-Ii that achieved MRR = 0.46 for QAC1. We mainly improved the answer-type determination module and the retrieval module. In general, a fine-grained answer taxonomy improves QA performance but it is difficult to build an accurate answer extraction module for the fine-grained taxonomy because Machine Learning methods require a huge training corpus and hand-crafted rules are hard to maintain. Therefore, we built a fine-grained system by using a coarse-grained named entity recognizer and a Japanese lexicon “Nihongo Goi-taikei.” Our experiments show that named entity/numerical expression recognition and word sense-based answer extraction mainly contributed to the performance. In addition, we developed a new proximity-based document retrieval module that performs better than BM25. We also compared its performance with MultiText, a conventional proximity-based retrieval method developed for QA.

Japanese (review)

Reviewed by: Japanese by Shoichi Iwasaki Tadao Miyamoto Japanese. By Shoichi Iwasaki. (London Oriental and African language library 5.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. xviii, 360. ISBN 1588112365. $114 (Hb). Japanese is one of the most well-investigated languages in the world, as reflected in a vast and growing literature. As exemplified by Samuel E. Martin’s classic book, A reference grammar of Japanese (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) and Masayoshi Shibatani’s seminal work, Languages of Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), scholars already have access to a fair amount of material on the grammar of Japanese in its entirety, raising the question of whether another such work is necessary. Iwasaki’s response to this question is a resounding ‘yes’. Despite its format, this book might be considered a concise encyclopedia of the Japanese language. I’s presentation of the grammar is for the most part theory-neutral, making the book highly comprehensible and suitable for a wide audience. The book will be of particular interest to (1) linguists with expertise in limited aspects of Japanese grammar who seek a larger perspective on the language; (2) language instructors who need prompt answers to students’ questions on fine grammatical points; and (3) students with a thirst for understanding every important grammatical feature of the language. The book’s fourteen chapters cover a wide range of issues related to Japanese phonology, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. Ch. 1, ‘Overview’ (1–10), addresses the controversial question of the genetic affiliation of Japanese, presenting contrasting forms of the Altaic and Austronesian hypotheses. Ch. 2, ‘Writing system’ (11–16), briefly discusses the importation of Chinese characters or kanji and the subsequent development of two sets of kana syllabaries, highlighting the functional differences in the mixed use of these scripts in modern texts. In addition to a brief discussion of Japanese phonemes, Ch. 3, ‘Sounds’ (17–28), provides an overview of such well-investigated phonological issues as high vowel devoicing and rendaku (sequential voicing). Japanese prosody is then conventionally presented in terms of H(igh) and L(ow) pitch patterns, using the Tokyo dialect as an illustration. The following two chapters explore the morphological characteristics of Japanese. In Ch. 4, ‘Words’ (29–56), I first discusses the sources of the Japanese lexicon, which is composed of native, Sino-Japanese, and Western loan vocabularies. He then goes on to provide a semi-exhaustive classification of the lexicon, including some rather language-specific word classes (e.g. sound-symbolic words and numeral classifiers). Ch. 5, ‘Morphology’ (57–81), is divided into two sections: inflectional morphological patterns (i.e. verb, adjective, and copula) and word-formation processes involving noun equivalents (e.g. compounding and reduplication). The next five chapters discuss Japanese syntax from a primarily typological perspective. Ch. 6, ‘Argument structures’ (83–104), discusses stative and eventive predicates. I provides a thorough categorization of the argument structures of these predicates based on argument type and case assignment. In Ch. 7, ‘Tense and aspect’ (105–24), I examines tense relative to three different grammatical properties: generic or nongeneric sentences, dynamic or stative predicates, and main or subordinate clauses. While I’s classification of aspect relies on the rather conventional categories of perfective, progressive, resultative, and inchoative, his description is thorough and thought-provoking. Ch. 8, ‘Grammatical constructions’ (125–73), provides a syntactico-typological account of the well-investigated potential, passive, causative, benefactive, and reciprocal constructions. The most important topic in Ch. 9, ‘Noun phrase structures’ (175–93), [End Page 779] is the relative clause, which is characterized by the use of a gapping strategy that displays no overt marking of the case relation between head and predicate. Ch. 10, ‘Embedding’ (195–216), discusses embedding processes such as quotation and complementation. Both subject and object complements are discussed in terms of the types of verbs with which they are associated. The next three chapters discuss the pragmatics of discourse, the first two from a structural perspective and the last in relation to social interaction. Ch. 11, ‘Information structure and the sentence form’ (217–46), concerns issues such as topicalization, focus structure, and types of topic-comment sentences. Ch. 12, ‘Discourse and grammar’ (247–74), focuses on clause combination and referent...

The Creation and Comprehension of English Loanwords in the Japanese Media

Nearly all Western loanwords in Japanese are first introduced to the public by a small number of individuals with most Japanese people having never heard or read the word before, and having no role to play in their borrowing. Because of this presumptuous use of foreign words by, for example, academics, government bodies, and the media, the meanings of many of the words used are little understood. In this paper, I examine how well understood the most commonly appearing loanwords are. After a literature survey, I examine corpus and frequency data based on the 2001 issues of the Mainichi newspapers. Nearly a quarter of the sampled items tested were found to be not understood by young, Japanese adults. However, it would appear that the confusion caused by the flood of Western loanwords is but a developmental condition, and as various borrowings compete for survival, they are propelling the lexical expansion of the Japanese lexicon.

Fundamental Vocabulary Selection Based on Word Familiarity

This paper proposes a new method for selecting fundamental vocabulary. We are presently constructing the Fundamental Vocabulary Knowledge-base of Japanese that contains integrated information on syntax, semantics and pragmatics, for the purposes of advanced natural language processing. This database mainly consists of a lexicon and a treebank: Lexeed (a Japanese Semantic Lexicon) and the Hinoki Treebank. Fundamental vocabulary selection is the first step in the construction of Lexeed. The vocabulary should include sufficient words to describe general concepts for self-expandability, and should not be prohibitively large to construct and maintain. There are two conventional methods for selecting fundamental vocabulary. The first is intuition-based selection by experts. This is the traditional method for making dictionaries. A weak point of this method is that the selection strongly depends on personal intuition. The second is corpus-based selection. This method is superior in objectivity to intuition-based selection, however, it is difficult to compile a sufficiently balanced corpora. We propose a psychologically-motivated selection method that adopts word familiarity as the selection criterion. Word familiarity is a rating that represents the familiarity of a word as a real number ranging from 1 (least familiar) to 7 (most familiar). We determined the word familiarity ratings statistically based on psychological experiments over 32 subjects. We selected about 30,000 words as the fundamental vocabulary, based on a minimum word familiarity threshold of 5. We also evaluated the vocabulary by comparing its word coverage with conventional intuition-based and corpus-based selection over dictionary definition sentences and novels, and demonstrated the superior coverage of our lexicon. Based on this, we conclude that the proposed method is superior to conventional methods for fundamental vocabulary selection.

The Japanese Mental Lexicon: Psycholinguistic Studies of Kana and Kanji Processing (review)

The Japanese Mental Lexicon: Psycholinguistic Studies of Kana and Kanji Processing (review)

Constituent‐morpheme priming: Implications from the morphology of two‐kanji compound words

The diversity in the morphological structure of two-kanji compound words is a matter of special concern for models of the Japanese mental lexicon. This study discusses two proposals for models of the Japanese mental lexicon - Hirose's (1992, 1994, 1996) hypotheses and a Japanese lemma-unit version of the multilevel interactive-activation framework - in terms of their ability to cope with this diversity. As the proposals make different predictions concerning constituent-morpheme priming, patterns of facilitation were examined in two experiments with five word-formation principles as experimental condi- tions. Experiment 1, using the long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 3000 ms employed by Hirose (1992), only found significant differences between the first- and second-element conditions in one of the word-formation conditions. Experiment 2, using a short SOA of 250 ms, confirmed the pattern of priming obtained in Experiment 1. These results are more consistent with the prediction from the Japanese lemma-unit model.

The Japanese Mental Lexicon: Studies of Kana and Kanji Processing

The Japanese Mental Lexicon: Studies of Kana and Kanji Processing

Standing stomachs, clamoring chests and cooling livers: Metaphors in the psychological lexicon of Japanese

I discuss the metaphorically-rooted psychological lexicon of Japanese in order to demonstrate the experiential and embodied aspect of mentation. Before examining the Japanese psychological lexicon, I offer a broad theoretical framework by introducing some deeply rooted philosophical assumptions that have governed our theorizings about the relations between the ‘inside’/‘outside’ worlds, mind/body, and mental representation/linguistic expression. Then, I introduce what I believe is a useful response to dualistic conceptualizations by introducing Lakoff's ideas about the fundamental role of metaphor and the ‘embodied’ nature of cognition. His ideas may be interpreted as an attempt to dismantle the misleading dualisms that have caused philosophers, psychologists, and linguists so much theoretical trouble. Next, I distinguish between what I call literal and figurative metaphors and discuss the bodily basis of linguistic metaphors of mind. Then, after discussing the tropic strategies universally employed to discuss mental events, I turn to examples from the psychological lexicon of Japanese to make my case. Finally, I examine additional evidence about the tropic nature of psychological experience by briefly examining the metaphoric shifts of meaning in Japanese onomatopoeia.

Acquisition and generalization of Japanese locatives by English-speakers

ABSTRACTAmerican 5-year-olds and adults learned to label various spatial relationships using four Japanese locatives that coincided or partially overlapped in meaning with the locative prepositions into, onto, out of, and off.Subjects' generalization of the Japanese words was pre- and post-tested to determine if locatives that were semantically (and to a small extent phonemically) similar to their English equivalents would yield better transfer than terms that deviated in meaning and phonemic structure from English. Results confirmed for children only that generalization was differentially affected following lexical training. Adults generalized all four Japanese words with equal accuracy and showed significantly better transfer than children on all but one locative.Lexical interference initially accounted for many adult and child substitution errors, but did not explain child errors on the post-test. Findings did not agree with predictions that semanticphonemic differences between English and Japanese locatives would adversely affect transfer of the Japanese lexicon to novel exemplars of these terms. Results did confirm, however, that adults learned the Japanese lexicon faster and better than the 5-year-olds.