We analyzed longitudinal survey data on language standardization of dialect in Tsuruoka city of Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. The Tsuruoka survey was carried out four times over 61 years, in 1950, 1971, 1991, and 2011, by National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) and The Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM). We selected native speakers of the Tsuruoka dialect, who participated in the Tsuruoka survey three times over 41 years, in 1950, 1971, 1991. Participants who were under 20 years old in 1950 were not included. Using this panel data (N = 38) from native speakers of the Tsuruoka dialect, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted. The result showed that long-term accent change tended towards standardization. However, there was no evidence that phonetic change tended towards standardization.

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In this paper, we report how the senses of a polysemous word are distributed in a given text. Using the “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese,” (BCCWJ) we received the following results. (1) Polysemous words are likely to share the same sense when occurring more than once in a given text. The tendency is not so strong as to admit no exceptions. (2) The gaps between instances of a polysemous word with the same sense are shorter than gaps with different senses and vice versa. (3) This phenomenon is also observed between a polysemous word and its synonyms and antonyms to some extent. These results suggest that the lexical cohesion positively affects the distribution of the senses of polysemous words as well as related terms to a lesser extent.

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