Some Problems of Sino-Japanese Cognate with a Tendency toward Direct Translation

A Survey of the Actual Usage of “KIHON” Using Various Corpora

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the lexical profile of Sino-Japanese cognate that have a high degree of semantic similarity between the two countries by examining their actual usage using various corpora. The corpora used in the survey are the “Sino-Japanese Bilingual Corpus” of the Beijing Center for Japanese Studies, the “Sino-Japanese Bilingual EGA Corpus,” a self-made corpus of approximately 5 million characters containing bilingual texts, the “Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU” of Peking University, the “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese Words BCCWJ”. The survey revealed that the behavior of the Sino-Japanese cognate “Kihon” is quite different between the two languages.