Abstract
Newspapers articles are written by reporters for the general public, so provide accurate information using simple standard expressions. However, it is not clear whether written texts in newspapers reflect typical language production by native speakers. It is assumed that mature native Japanese speakers produce various sound-symbolic words—such as onomatopoeia and mimesis, which are cultivated through childhood experience—with various related verbs. The present study investigated the similarities of collocation patterns for 28 different sound-symbolic words co-occurring with verbs, by comparing nine years of Asahi Newspaper articles (1991-99) with verbal production by 36 native Japanese speakers within 30 seconds.
No significant differences were found in either the variation criterion of entropy or the regularity criterion of redundancy for collocational patters between newspaper corpus and native speakers’ production. The result indicated a great similarity between newspaper corpus and native speakers. Exceptional words were only found in 4 out of 28 sound-symbolic words from the descriptive perspective.
