Reexamination of the Classic Example of Misuse in Modern Japanese

ki ga okenai

Abstract

The author has presented the results of his research on cases of “new words and new usages, ” focusing on what are known as “misuses” in modern Japanese. In this type of research, it is sometimes necessary to revisit cases that have already been covered once. In recent years, there has been a succession of new releases of corpus and databases, as well as the addition and updating of data, which has greatly contributed to the collection of examples from the recent past. When I used these to conduct a new case study, I came across a case that required me to revise the description in my previous article. In this article, I will report on the classic example of “ misuse, ” ki ga oke nai.