Language change observed through the idiom “ashi wo arau”

A corpus approach

Abstract

The idiom “ashi wo arau” has a wide variety of uses, as it can not only be used in regard to evil deeds, but also in regard to good. Examples taken from corpora reflect the changes in the usage of this idiom, which are caused by both internal and external linguistic factors. Although to grasp the full picture of language change it is necessary to investigate a number of expressions, in this paper, we take the idiom “ashi wo arau” as a singular example, using it to test an approach to language change as seen from the perspectives of one’s state of mind and social environment. As shown in previous studies, corpora play an important role in the compilation of dictionaries. In this paper, it is confirmed that the usage of “ashi wo arau” can be reliably analyzed using corpora. Thus, corpus data will contribute greatly to both lexical description in the dictionary and the development of teaching materials.