An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute:
A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/
HTML Version(1997)
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II.2.3 Research in Colloquial Japanese
(Report 8, 1955. pages)
This is an analytical study which attempts to survey the
characteristics of colloquial Japanese from various points of
view.
The main materials were collected from everyday
conversations spoken by natives of Tokyo, and from radio news
programs, news commentaries, symposia, comic stories,
plays, lectures, and so on.
The items investigated were: 1) intonation; 2) length of
sentences; bunsetu or Bloch's pause groups, and words; 3)
sentence structure; 4) parts of speech, their usage and
frequency.
The results are as follows:
1. Keeping Pike's four-step-high-low tone system in
mind, we examined the utterances of 44 informants; we found 42
kinds of intonation at the end of sentences. We found only
four kinds of such intonation on the radio. We divided these
kinds of intonation into five main intonation patterns:
2. The average length of a sentence was 3.8
bunsetu. Sentences composed of one bunsetu accounted for
nearly one-third of the total. In radio news programs and
news commentaries, the average length of the sentences were 16.5
bunsetu and 21 bunsetu respectively; sentences of one
bunsetu were only about 2% of the total.
3. Sentences without expressed subjects constituted 74%
of the total; those in news programs were only 37%. Inverted
sentences were 7%; in news, 0%. Sentences with more
than five components constituted about 5% of the
total in conversation; in news, 30%.
4. The frequency of parts of speech in all the data
was: nouns 20.5%; verbs 12.2%; adjectives 2.7%;
adjectival verbs 1.2%; adverbs 6.1%; pre-nouns 0.8%;
conjunctives 1.9%; interjections 4.7% (total of free forms
50.1%); zyosi 34.7%; zyodosi 12.9% (total of bound forms
47.6%); sandhi-forms 2.3%. 36% of the adjectival verbs were
kango, or Chinese borrowings.
This survey was conducted by NAKAMURA Mitio, OISI
Hatutaro, UNO Yosikata, IITOYO Kiiti and SINDO Sakiko.
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