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BARRS, Keith
Department Hiroshima shudo University The Faculty of Humanities and Human Sciences Position Professor |
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| Language | English |
| Publication Date | 2014/09 |
| Type | Articles |
| Title | English Loanwords in Japanese : What Loanwords Mean vs How Loanwords are Used |
| Contribution Type | Single-Authored Publication |
| Journal | 広島修大論集 |
| Journal Type | Japan |
| Volume, Issue, Pages | 55(1),pp.33-38 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Details | Researching the lexical semantics of loanwords can reveal what changes have happened to the words as they move from one language to another. The data produced from such analyses can be beneficial to language learners who may encounter words in the target language which are already familiar in one (or more) of their known languages. In order to research the semantic change of English words which have been borrowed into Japanese, the traditional approach has been to rely on the intuition of the researcher or a small group of research participants. The development of large-scale corpora, and the tools necessary to query these corpora, allow this traditional approach to be replaced by empirical analysis of natural language data. This article reports on a comparison of data on the semantics of loanwords produced by introspection, with that produced by a corpus analysis. The results show that introspective data may be an ineffective and unreliable way of investigating semantic change. |