Tendencies in Word Forms of Polysemous Adjectives Expressing Taste

A Comparison with Monosemous Words and Similarity Judgments

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the factors underlying the phenomenon in which specific word forms of polysemous words tend to appear preferentially, depending on their respective senses. In this investigation, we focused on contemporaneous Japanese adjectives that express taste, as addressed in previous research. First, we examined whether certain senses of polysemous words are more likely to appear in specific inflectional forms and word forms by analyzing the frequency of these forms according to sense, using the annotation of Word List by Semantic Principles for the Balanced Corpus of Contemporaneous Written Japanese. Next, in order to examine how specific word forms are associated with particular senses, we conducted a corpus-based comparison of the occurrence tendencies in monosemous words. Through this analysis, we confirmed that specific word forms are not necessarily linked directly to particular senses. Furthermore, we analyzed the degree of similarity between specific word forms and usage examples using a similarity judgment survey. The results showed that although biases in inflectional forms were observed depending on the senses, the occurrence patterns of word forms in monosemous words did not align with those of particular senses in polysemous words. This finding indicates that the bias in word forms is not attributable to the senses themselves. On the other hand, the analysis of similarity ratings suggested that in some cases, specific word forms were indeed associated with certain senses of polysemous words.