Japanese Expressions that Include English Expressions

Japanese Expressions that Include English Expressions * Masaki Murata a, Toshiyuki Kanamaru a, Koichirou Nakamoto b, Katsunori Kotani a, and Hitoshi Isahara a aNational Institure of Information and Communications Technology, 3-5, Hikaridai, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, 619-0289, Japan {murata, kanamaru, isahara}@nict.go.jp, kat@khn.nict.go.jp b Osaka University of Foreign Studies, 8-1-1 Aomatani-Higashi, Minoh, Osaka, 562-8558, Japan nobi@sings.jp Abstract: We extracted English expressions that appear in Japanese sentences in newspaper articles and on the Internet. The results obtained from the newspaper articles showed that the preposition “in” has been regularly used for more than ten years, and it is still regularly used now. The results obtained from the Internet articles showed there were many kinds of English expressions from various parts of speech. We extracted some interesting expressions that included English prepositions and verb phrases. These were interesting because they had different word orders to the normal order in Japanese expressions. Comparing the extracted English and katakana expressions, we found that the expressions that are commonly used in Japanese are often written in the katakana syllabary and that the expressions that are not so often used in Japanese, such as prepositions, are hardly ever written in the katakana syllabary. Keyword: English expression, katakana expression, newspaper article, Internet 1. Introduction We often see English expressions inserted in Japanese sentences, such as “コンサート in 東 京” (“コンサート”=concert, “東京”=Tokyo). We extracted such expressions that were written in kanji, katakana, hiragana, and Roman alphabet characters or combinations of these characters from articles in the Mainichi Shinbun (a major daily Japanese language newspaper) and on the Internet. From the same sources, we also extracted expressions that used katakana characters instead of English characters, such as “博覧会イン京都” (“博覧会”= exposition, “イン”=in, “京都”=Kyoto). The study of such expressions is useful for linguists studying the development process of languages (Ito (2001), Daulton (2003), and Murata et al. (2004)). 2. Automatic extraction of English and Katakana expressions We used computers to extract candidate expressions in Japanese that included English expressions from Mainichi Shinbun articles published between 1991 and 2005 and from about 2 GB of Internet articles. We then checked the candidate expressions by hand to select the actual expressions we would use in our research. We initially extracted expressions from Mainichi Shinbun articles. We took only the expressions that contained brackets. This is because expressions that include English * Copyright 2007 by Masaki Murata, Toshiyuki Kanamaru, Koichirou Nakamoto, Katsunori Kotani, Hitoshi Isahara 330 expressions in Japanese sentences often appear in brackets. We automatically extracted expressions that satisfied the following conditions: i) included both Japanese characters in hiragana, katakana, and kanji and characters in the Roman alphabet, ii) the adjacent characters to English expressions are Japanese characters, or English expressions appear at the beginning of the expressions or the end of the expressions, iii) the second to last characters of the English expression were not capitalized, and iv) English expressions that consisted of more than one character. The condition ii) is used because there were many cases where the expressions were just replaced with Japanese …

Content truncated to 500 words