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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