抄録
It is recognized that frequency of Katakana representation is increasing in newspapers or magazines in recent years, but few systematic or quantitative analysis has been reported regarding the word representation, so far. Based on a newly- compiled large-scale Japanese corpus (BCCWJ), we perform statistical analysis of Katakana representation both for Japanese native words and the words imported from classical Chinese. The analysis shows that the tendency of Katakana representation largely depends on the word itself, and therefore the tendency can be considered as useful information that should be described in dictionaries. We also show that frequency of Katakana representation for each word exhibits a specific pattern in terms of source types, such as newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as the word types, such as onomatopoeia, mimesis, and word commonness.