Diachronic Change in Sino-Japanese Word Formation : Focus on Four-Character Words(<Special Issue>Current Topics and Prospects in the Study of Modern Japanese)

Abstract

It is said that new vocabulary items in contemporary Japanese are more likely to be loanwords (especially from English) rather than Sino-Japanese words. While this is true if attention is limited to Sino-Japanese words written with two characters, Sino-Japanese words written with three or four characters are still created quite productively. Such longer words are commonly used but have not attracted as much attention as two-character words, in part because many of these longer words are not listed in dictionaries. This study investigates the formation patterns of four-character Sino-Japanese words and the diachronic changes in those patterns during the Edo, Meiji, and contemporary periods.