This paper discusses the meaning of the Japanese word ingin-burei (‘politely insolent'), specifically what its prototype is and whether it is understood differently by people with different attributes. We formulated a prototype for ingin-burei, consisting of three elements: a high degree of formality, a low degree of directness, and a low degree of agreeableness. Based on examples from corpora, we assumed five types of ingin-burei.
 We administered two surveys, first to undergraduates, second to graduate students and professors. In the first survey, hypothetical situations which described speech acts embodying combinations of these three elements were presented to subjects, to be judged on the degree to which the character in the situation could be said to be formal, direct, and agreeable. In the second, the same situations were presented to be judged on the degree to which the character could be said to be ingin- burei. The results were analyzed as to the effects of types of ingin-burei and those of attributes of the subjects. In both surveys, the prototype theory of ingin-burei was confirmed. Further, parts of the results were examined to find the correlation between the surveys.
 Lastly, we point out some problems caused by ingin-burei to politeness theory.

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It is recognized that frequency of Katakana representation is increasing in newspapers or magazines in recent years, but few systematic or quantitative analysis has been reported regarding the word representation, so far. Based on a newly- compiled large-scale Japanese corpus (BCCWJ), we perform statistical analysis of Katakana representation both for Japanese native words and the words imported from classical Chinese. The analysis shows that the tendency of Katakana representation largely depends on the word itself, and therefore the tendency can be considered as useful information that should be described in dictionaries. We also show that frequency of Katakana representation for each word exhibits a specific pattern in terms of source types, such as newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as the word types, such as onomatopoeia, mimesis, and word commonness.

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