Social media has become one of the fundamental infrastructures, providing huge materials for social media study. Although one of the advantages of social media is that all posted texts are associated with the authors, a few studies paid attention to this nature. Based on this nature, this study introduces a novel concept, the number of word users. The number of users enables to capture the phenomenon that a small number of individuals use a word frequently. Also, it provides word statistics without individual bias. Finally, this study discusses how to approach standard Japanese words by using the number of word-users.

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The modifier-verb ratio (MVR) is often used as a measure of stylistic features based on the part-of-speech structure. This study empirically investigated whether the MVR or part-of-speech structure can capture descriptions of the state and movement in stories, thus addressing a literature gap. We reanalyzed the survey data of Iseki et al. (2022) by using publicly available linguistic resources. The study mapped imageability ratings of story to the Abstractness of Word Database for Japanese Common Words as well as ratings of the unfolding speed of story to the presence or absence of a state change in the Predicate-Argument Structure Thesaurus. The results showed that these ratings data have certain convergent validity. In addition, they suggested the unfolding speed under a specific structure cannot be explained without both the number of sentences and the part-of-speech composition rate.

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We have focused on local assembly minutes as a large-scale language resource, and have developed 'Giimiru,' a cross-searching and visualization system for local assembly minutes, based on the corpus construction. This paper outlines the feature visualization using XAI technology newly implemented in 'Giimiru,' and describes the prospects for contributing to quantitative research on the Japanese language through observation and discussion of the visualization results. While many place names and councilor names were highlighted in the visualization results, not a few expressions that characterize other regions were also found, suggesting the possibility of discovering features that cannot be captured by human visual confirmation alone.

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This study analyzes the Hiroshima and Nagasaki 'Peace Declarations' and 'Oath to Peace' from the perspective of Japanese linguistics. As the title indicates, this is an exploratory study, and therefore, various analytical methods were used. For the 'Peace Declaration,' we found commonalities in the messages of the declaration read out in both cities. Regarding the correspondence analysis, we found that more than the differences between the cities, the differences between the eras, such as Showa, Heisei and Reiwa, were effective in the language. Not only the 'Peace Declaration' by the two mayors, but also the 'Oath to Peace' included in the program of the 'Peace Memorial Ceremony' highlighted the characteristics of the elementary school students in Hiroshima, who are the inheritors, and the Nagasaki hibakusha as survivors.

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In the lyrics of Japanese popular songs, double notation such as jikan(toki) and onna(hito) can be observed. Double notation is a form of notation that combines main-notation which indicates the written form, such as jikan, and sub-notation which indicates the phonetic form in the shape of notes or side notes attached to the main-notation, such as (toki). This study focuses on double notation such as jikan(toki) in which the main-notation and sub-notation do not have a corresponding relationship in the dictionary, and aims to clarify the diachronic changes of double notation in lyrics, by examining Japanese popular songs for approximately 50 years from 1969 to 2019.The results showed that the frequency of the use of double notation in lyrics can be divided into three periods: the 1960s and 1970s, when the use of double notation was stagnant; the 1980s and 1990s, when it fluctuated greatly; and the 2000s onward, when it became more stable. In addition, it was confirmed that the most frequent patterns of double notation in lyrics were those in which the part-of-speech composition was noun(noun), the word class composition was Kango(Wago), and the character composition was Kanji(Hiragana).

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For the purposes of this study, university students from three countries with different social backgrounds (Germany, Serbia, and Japan) were asked to answer the same topic, “A country easy to live in, and the conditions for it.” We qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the words used to express their thoughts in the written essays. The results confirmed our hypothesis that frequently appearing words differ from country to country. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis showed that words that were commonly used in each country were used in different contexts. Based on these results, it might be possible to theorize that the perception and usage of certain words differ depending on the environment in which people using them are educated and the experiences they gained up to that point. In this study, the corpus of learners with different mother tongues provides not only linguistic data; we also suggest that in combination with qualitative analysis it can be used as teaching material that aids the development of intercultural competence.

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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the considerations involved in statistically analyzing real language data. Most of the data used in linguistic research are qualitative data. When qualitative data are analyzed statistically, they need to be converted into quantitative data in an appropriate manner. In this paper, I focus on three types of qualitative data used in linguistic research: questionnaires, interviews, and linguistic corpora. Statistical processing of natural language is a procedure that transfers the analog world to the digital world. Behind the process is always the judgment and thought of the researcher. It is important to always be aware of the starting point for statistical analysis.

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[in Japanese]

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