Abstract
Japanese is described as the naru (‘become’) language (e.g., Ikegami 1981, 2006), which predicts that intransitive verbs are more frequently used than transitive verbs. The present study, therefore, selected 36 intransitive-and-transitive paired verbs and compared their frequencies using 18 years (1998-2015) of news articles from the Mainichi Newspaper. A t-test analysis revealed no overall difference in the frequencies between intransitive and transitive verbs as well as no differences within the five forms of these verbs (i.e., infinitive, adverbial, conditional, imperative and predicative). The same t-tests conducted on the frequencies transformed by loge(x+0.5) also indicated no differences except for the imperative form, indicating a reverse direction for the prediction made by the feature of naru language since transitive verbs are more frequently used in the imperative form than intransitive verbs. A correlation of frequencies between intransitive and transitive verbs was also very high (r=0.70, p<.001), showing great similarity between the two types of verbs. The present study thus demonstrated that both intransitive and transitive verbs display overall similarity in frequencies, possibly due to a great variety of usages for these paired verbs.
