Analyzing Semantic Change in Japanese Loanwords

Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 1195–1204, Valencia, Spain, April 3-7, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Analyzing Semantic Changes in Japanese Loanwords Hiroya Takamura Tokyo Institute of Technology takamura@pi.titech.ac.jp Ryo Nagata Konan University nagata-acl@hyogo-u.ac.jp Yoshifumi Kawasaki Sophia University kyossii@gmail.com Abstract We analyze semantic changes in loan- words from English that are used in Japanese (Japanese loanwords). Specifi- cally, we create word embeddings of En- glish and Japanese and map the Japanese embeddings into the English space so that we can calculate the similarity of each Japanese word and each English word. We then attempt to find loanwords that are semantically different from their original, see if known meaning changes are cor- rectly captured, and show the possibility of using our methodology in language ed- ucation. 1 Introduction We often come across advertisements that have ex- travagant images. In Japan, such images are usu- ally accompanied by the following sentence1: This sentence sounds like a nonsense tautology, but actually means this image is only for illustra- tive purposes and may differ from the actual prod- uct. Both gaz¯o and im¯eji are Japanese words, each meaning image. However, the latter is a loanword from English, i.e., image2. In the sentence above, im¯eji, the loanword for image, is closer in mean- ing to the word impression, and it makes the sen- tence roughly mean this image is just an impres- 1TOP and COP respectively mean a topic marker and a copula in interlinear glossed text (IGT) representation. The last line is a literal translation of the Japanese sentence. 2Note that although gaz¯o is also from ancient Chinese, we focus on loanwords from English, which are usually written in katakana letters in Japanese. sion that you might have on this product. What happens in this seeming tautology is that the loan- word changes meaning; i.e., the sense of the loan- word deviates from the sense of its original word. Loanwords from English occupy an important place in the Japanese language. It is reported that approximately 8% of the vocabulary of contem- porary Japanese consists of loanwords from En- glish (Barrs, 2013). One noteworthy characteris- tics of loanwords in Japanese is that their mean- ings are often different from their original words, as in the above example.Indeed, the meanings of loanwords in any language are not generally the same as those in the language, but according to Kay (1995), Japanese has particularly a strong ten- dency of changing the meanings of loanwords; Kay argued that in Japan there is no deep cul- tural motivation to protect their original meaning. Daulton (2009) also argued that Japanese loan- words are malleable in terms of meanings. Thus, Japanese loanwords would be an interesting sub- ject to work on in the study of meaning change. Japanese loanwords from English are also im- portant in language education (Barrs, 2013). Japanese learners of English often make mistakes in using English words that have corresponding loanwords in …

Content truncated to 500 words