Corpus and Statistics for the Study of the History of Modern Japanese Vocabulary

An Analysis of the Increase/Decrease of Word Usage Using the Diachronic Corpus of Mainichi Shimbun

Abstract

In order to describe the historical changes of "vocabulary" as a set of words, it is necessary to prepare a corpus for this purpose. It is also necessary to devise statistical methods to find significant trends of change using the corpus. In this paper, I introduce the contents and characteristics of the diachronic corpus of the Mainichi Shimbun since the mid-20th century, which I have created and expanded, and report the results of my analysis of the increase and decrease of word usage in the corpus using ridit analysis.