The purpose of this paper is to clarify the lexical profile of Sino-Japanese cognate that have a high degree of semantic similarity between the two countries by examining their actual usage using various corpora. The corpora used in the survey are the “Sino-Japanese Bilingual Corpus” of the Beijing Center for Japanese Studies, the “Sino-Japanese Bilingual EGA Corpus,” a self-made corpus of approximately 5 million characters containing bilingual texts, the “Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU” of Peking University, the “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese Words BCCWJ”. The survey revealed that the behavior of the Sino-Japanese cognate “Kihon” is quite different between the two languages.

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In this study, we generated word vectors (Word2Vec) from the data of the Corpus of Historical Japanese and, based on the similarity of these vectors, we constructed a parallel corpus of the Takano (established in the Kamakura period) and Amakusa (established in the Muromachi period) editions of The Tales of the Heike. This parallel corpus enabled us to identify the changes between the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. A case study revealed, the following four points about the Amakusa edition: (i) It tends to add particles such as wa, mo, made, ga, and wo to bare noun phrases in the Takano edition. (ii) It sometimes adds nouns to nominalized verb phrases with the adnominal forms found in the Takano edition. (iii) It tends to translate the quotative particle tote (quotative + sequential) in the Takano edition to toiute (quotative say-sequential), except when the use is purposive. (iv) It tends to use compound sentences where the Takano edition uses two separate sentences.

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This paper provides an overview of Chinese character usage in the Shōwa and Heisei eras, focusing on the usage rates of Chinese characters in Japanese sentences and examining their changes over time. Based on another study suggesting that Chinese character usage varied by media or genre, this study analyses the usage rates of Chinese characters in the monthly magazine Bungei Shunjū as a case study, and compares the rates to those reported in previous studies of modern fiction. The findings show that the rate of Chinese character usage stabilised after declining until the mid-20th century when viewed from a broad perspective, a trend also observed in modern fiction. However, the differences between the two are that the magazine articles generally contain more Chinese characters than do the works of modern fiction. Additionally, while the rate in the magazine increased slightly after the late 20th century, it did not reach early 20th-century levels and showed a more gradual change than the stabilisation observed in modern fiction. This indicates a potential difference in Chinese character usage between magazines and modern fiction.

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The author has presented the results of his research on cases of “new words and new usages, ” focusing on what are known as “misuses” in modern Japanese. In this type of research, it is sometimes necessary to revisit cases that have already been covered once. In recent years, there has been a succession of new releases of corpus and databases, as well as the addition and updating of data, which has greatly contributed to the collection of examples from the recent past. When I used these to conduct a new case study, I came across a case that required me to revise the description in my previous article. In this article, I will report on the classic example of “ misuse, ” ki ga oke nai.

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