An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute:
A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/
HTML Version(1997)
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II.3.2 Research on Vocabulary in Women's Magazines
(Report 4, 1953. 338 pages)
This is the first result of the successive surveys mentioned
above, it might be one of the first projects in the world of
word counts by the sampling method.
The reason that we selected women's magazines as our material
was to find the actual state of the use of daily words. The
"universes" were the complete text of 3,204 pages of the "Syuhu no
Tomo" and, for comparison, the complete text of domestic
articles in the "Huzin Seikatu," both from January to December,
1950. By a stratified sampling 521 pages were drawn from the
"Syuhu no Tomo." The running number of words or, more
exactly, a-units (as named by us) was some 146,000. (The total
number in our "universe" was estimated to be 9,000,000
a-units.) The number of different words in our sample was some
27,000.
About 2,600 free forms and 105 affixes which occurred nine
times or more in our sample were listed in the order of
kana-syllabary, with their relative frequencies. A word
list in the order of frequency was also given.
This report contains the following sections:
Analysis of frequencies and scopes-
1) Grading words by their relative frequencies,
2) "Scattering" index of words among strata of articles,
3) Distributions of relative frequencies.
Trials in semantics-
1) Semantic classification of the 4,300 words(later expanded
into Source 6),
2) Semantic analysis of several words,
3) Usage of "suru," the verb most frequently used.
Analysis of word-construction, especially patterns of
compound words formed with Chinese elements.
Frequency table of zyosi and zyodosi, and their usage
(according to the method of Report 3, Bound Forms in Modern
Japanese).
Using the same materials, a research on the
writing was undertaken. A list of the Chinese characters which
occurred in our sample was also published on the report.
This project was carried out cooperatively by HAYASI Oki,
NAGANO Masaru, ONO Yaoko, SAIGA Hideo, UNO Yosikata and
MIZUTANI Sizuo, and the statistical design was mainly by
MIZUTANI.
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