抄録
A strong earthquake occurred on the coast of Noto Peninsula in Japan on Mar. 25, 2007. It registered 6.9 on the Richter scale, and the seismometer recorded the utmost tremor of a little over the 6th degree on the seismic scale at Wajima City, Nanao City and Anamizu-machi. This quake was named “The Noto Hanto Earthquake in 2007” by the Japan Meteorological Agency. It caused serious damage to the Noto area. These serious states have been reported not only in Japanese newspapers but also in English newspapers. In this study, English articles were investigated to extract linguistic characteristics. Besides, articles on “The Mid Niigata Prefecture Earthquake in 2004” which occurred on Oct. 23, 2004 were analyzed for comparison. Frequency characteristics of character- and word-appearance were investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary were calculated to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material. As a result, it was clearly shown that English articles on the Noto Hanto Earthquake came to have a similar tendency to English journalisms in the characteristics of character-appearance as the days passed. Besides, the values of K-characteristic for the articles tended to increase, and the difficulty-level tended to decrease. In addition, as for the frequency of some words, while the frequency of “earthquake”-related words gradually decreased, that of “cancel” increased. This seems to be because the harmful rumor had spread and cancellation of lodgings had increased.
