Abstract
This study is a comparative analysis of the use tendency of honorific nouns (nouns with the prefix o / go) in spoken and written languages. As a result of the analysis, the following four points became evident: 1) Honorific nouns are used more frequently as beautifying honorifics than as respectful and humble honorifics in both Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation (CEJC) and Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), and comparing the two data, honorific nouns as beautifying honorifics are easier to use in CEJC, and honorific nouns as respectful honorifics and humble honorifics are easier to use in BCCWJ; 2) Regarding respectful honorifics, there is a difference between high frequency words in CEJC and BCCWJ; 3) Regarding humble honorifics, the frequency of honorific nouns is low especially in CEJC, suggesting hollowing out of humble honorifics; 4) For beautifying honorifics, four clusters were obtained for both CEJC and BCCWJ by cluster analysis, and especially for words with a high appearance rate of beautifying honorifics, words in CEJC shows a derivative tendency, and words in BCCWJ shows a lexical tendency.
