Cooccurrence Patterns between Nouns Denoting Gradable Properties and Scalar Adjectivals: A Diachronic Study

Abstract

This paper, based on the analysis of a corpus made up of the minutes of the National Diet of Japan since 1947, investigates the diachronic shift in the cooccurrence patterns between a noun denoting a gradable property (a complex noun formed of a 2-letter Sino-Japanese base and a suffix such as -sei ‘-ness’, -ritu ‘rate’, -do ‘degree’, -ryō ‘quantity’, or -ryoku ‘power’) and a scalar adjectival (like ōkī ‘large’, ōi ‘many’, tuyoi ‘strong’, takai ‘high’ / tīsai ‘small’, sukunai ‘few’, yowai ‘weak’, hikui ‘low’) as they form a subject-predicate collocation.

  As far as the nouns appearing in the corpus with sufficiently high frequency are concerned, the following observations hold. Many nouns of the form -sei, -ritu, or -do show an increased preference for takai among the positve scalar adjectivals diacrhonically. Also, some nouns of the same form show an increased preference for hikui among the negative scalar adjectivals, seemingly corresponding to the shift mentioned above. On the other hand, nouns of the form -ryoo or -ryoku show no remarkable change in the preference patterns for the scalar adjectivals. These observations lead to the speculation that a change is in progress to the effect that takai is predominantly used for representing the positve values for the properties denoted by the nouns of the form X-sei, X-ritu, or X-do.