This study analyzes a variation between taranai/tarinai in the Okazaki Survey on Honorifics (OSH), conducted thrice by the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics, starting with the first survey, OSH I in 1957, followed by OSH II in 1972 and OSH III in 2008. Okazaki is in the contact area of taranai and tarinai, which are distributed in the Western and Eastern parts of Japan, respectively, thus resulting in an active variation between the two forms. We show that the percentage of tarinai usage decreases from OSH I to II, and increases from II to III. Respondents tended to use their choice in the first survey, but the correlation between their choice of the two forms and the age of the respondents of the first survey was not significant. This implies that the change from taranai to tarinai indicates an acquisition of a new word, and it is not bound by the critical period of language acquisition. Based on various evidence, we conclude that the change from OSH I to II is an accommodation of the Nagoya dialect, a major city to the west of Okazaki in the taranai area, and the one from OSH II to III is a return to the original usage prevalent in the Okazaki area.

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National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) is conducting continuous linguistic survey in Tsuruoka-City. Sounds are one of the research items. Paying attention to the percentage of those who use nasal ga, we performed real time comparison. It turned out that the nasal ga is on the decline in the meantime. However, observing the cohort (the same birth group), it turned out that there is not a big change. This shows that the cause of declines of nasal ga mainly depends on a constituent's exchange. It seems that there are few people who changed their pronunciation. In order to make this clear, we analyzed also the data of the panel survey. It was claryfied that it is generally right. Paying attention to the same year-of-birth layer, we compared the difference of continuous survey with that of the panel survey. It turned out that there is a difference in about ten percent. We examined the reason which brought such a result. We guess that the respondent of a panel survey contain strong normative consciousness for language more than average. If that is truth, the panel survey is very useful at the point that we can grasp the existence of an individual change certainly. However, in grasping a numerical value, there may be a limit.

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This paper reports the Longitudinal Database of Dialect Standardization in Tsuruoka City of Yamagata Prefecture. The latest version of this database (ver.2.0) has informer’s attribute data, phonetic data, and language attitude data based on three times surveys conducted in 1950, 1971, and 1991.

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This paper attempts to classify and extract role language from a video game which is a new linguistic text. After using cluster analysis and specialization coefficient on “Dragon Quest 3 ”, I found 6 clusters as follows: 1. Outsiders’ language (the case particles GA/WO, and the adverbial particle HA are seldom used); 2. Women’s language (the pronoun ATASHI, the auxiliary verb CHAU, the adverbial particles TTARA/NANNTE, the conjunction particle KEREDO, the final particles KASHIRA/MONO/WA/NO/NE, and the interjections KYA-/MAA/ARA are frequently used); 3. Neutral language (there are no characteristic expressions in this group); 4. Elders’ language (the pronouns SONATA/WASHI, the auxiliary verbs JYA/TORU/DEARU/MAI, the adverbial particle NAZO, the final particles NOU/ZOI/ZO, and the interjection YAREYARE are frequently used); 5. Men’s language (the pronouns OMEE/ORE/ANNTA, the auxiliary verbs YAGARU/CHIMAU/TEYARU, the adverbial particle NANNKA, the final particles ZE/I/SA, and the interjections HEI/OI are frequently used); 6. Boys’ language (the pronoun BOKU, the final particles YOU/SA/YA/NAA, the quasi-nominal particle N, and the interjections WA-I/NEE are frequently used). It means that adverbial particles and conjunction particles receiving less attention before may be a factor of role language.

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This paper quantitatively examines the alternation between the two negative addressee-honorific constructions in contemporary Japanese; -mas-en (the prescriptive form) and nai desu (the new form). Based on the interpretation of the best statistical model, this paper makes two novel observations. First, presence of the epistemic suffix -yoo is the strongest in effect size, favoring the new form. Second, although previous studies hypothesized that stative predicates (e.g., wakar- ‘understand’ and deki- ‘ can’) are prototypes for the new form (Noda 2004; Kawaguchi 2014), they do not show a systematic, strong preference when important fixed effects are all controlled. Instead, this paper identifies the prototypes for each construction by looking at the estimated value of the random effect, revealing that -tai ‘ want’ is a prototype of the nai desu form and nega-e- ‘ can wish’ is a prototype of the -mas-en form.

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We have been constructing the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation, CEJC, under the NINJAL collaborative research project since 2016. The main features of the CEJC are i) that we target conversations embedded in naturally occurring activities in daily life; ii) that we collect various kinds of everyday conversations in a balanced manner so as to capture the diversity of everyday conversations and to observe natural conversational behavior; and iii) that we collect and publish not only audio but also video data in order to precisely understand the mechanism of our real-life social behavior. Prior to the publication of the whole corpus scheduled for 2022, we published the monitor version of the CEJC in December 2018. In this article, we first outline the design of the monitor version of the CEJC. Then, we conduct a preliminary analysis, showing possible implications of the corpus.

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