Comparing Frequencies of Japanese Intransitive/Transitive 36 Paired Verbs

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  • Tamaoka Katsuo
    Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University
  • ZHANG Jingyi
    Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University
  • makioka Shogo
    Graduate School of Humanities and Sustainable System Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University

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Other Title
  • 日本語自他対応動詞36 対の使用頻度の比較
  • ニホンゴ ジタ タイオウ ドウシ 36ツイ ノ シヨウ ヒンド ノ ヒカク

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Abstract

Japanese is described as the naru (‘become’) language (e.g., Ikegami 1981, 2006), which predicts that intransitive verbs are more frequently used than transitive verbs. The present study, therefore, selected 36 intransitive-and-transitive paired verbs and compared their frequencies using 18 years (1998-2015) of news articles from the Mainichi Newspaper. A t-test analysis revealed no overall difference in the frequencies between intransitive and transitive verbs as well as no differences within the five forms of these verbs (i.e., infinitive, adverbial, conditional, imperative and predicative). The same t-tests conducted on the frequencies transformed by loge(x+0.5) also indicated no differences except for the imperative form, indicating a reverse direction for the prediction made by the feature of naru language since transitive verbs are more frequently used in the imperative form than intransitive verbs. A correlation of frequencies between intransitive and transitive verbs was also very high (r=0.70, p<.001), showing great similarity between the two types of verbs. The present study thus demonstrated that both intransitive and transitive verbs display overall similarity in frequencies, possibly due to a great variety of usages for these paired verbs.

Journal

  • Mathematical Linguistics

    Mathematical Linguistics 31 (6), 443-460, 2018-09-20

    The Mathematical Linguistic Society of Japan

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