抄録
This study argues the pragmatic factors which motivate the choice of the four reflexive pronouns jibun, jisin, mizukara, and jiko. Since the differences of these words are subtle and the speaker' attitudes are complex, we introduced Improved Rating (IR) method which is developed from Oda's Fuzzy-set Concurrent Rating (FCR) method. The analysis consists of two parts. First, a corpus-based investigation suggests that the choice of these words may be motivated by a range of factors including anticipants, conversation style, and contents, which can all be related to the "psychological distance". Second, in order to reconfirm the psychological distance hypothesis, we executed a questionnaire using the IR method. As a result, the "psychological distance" turns out to be an effective factor influencing the speakers' attitudes and thus word choice.
