An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute:
A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/
HTML Version(1997)
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II.2.6 Japanese Homonyms and Their Problems
(Report 20, 1961. 289 pages)
It is said that there are many homonyms obstructing
communication in modern Japanese. The degree and
characteristics of the obstruction are not uniform, however, the
purposes of this study were to determine the real degree to which
the semantic ambiguity of homonyms occurs, to analyze the
factors working to distinguish homonyms, and to see what
problems are encountered in the promotion of communication.
There is considerable ambiguity in some homonyms and not
in others. We therefore classified homonyms first, laying down
the following criteria: 1) sociological differences, 2)
grammatical differences, 3) idiomatic or non-idiomatic, 4)
differences in tones, 5) productivity, and 6) frequency.
Besides these characteristics of homonyms themselves,
the discrimination of homonyms is influenced by the users'
knowledge. On this point we made an experiment using
students of high schools and universities. We found that all
homonyms can be discriminated to some extent either by
characteristics of the words themselves (for example, part
of speech, idiomatic usage, productivity,
word-construction, etc.), by phase differences, or by
context. It was also made clear that few homonyms except
homonymic synonyms have no clue of discrimination. It was
also established that the problems of homonyms greatly
depend upon the readers' age and experience.
The latter half of this book is devoted to a word list
containing 7,803 homonyms.
This survey was carried out by MATUO Osamu, ITIKAWA
Takasi, OKUBO Ai and TANAKA Akio.
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