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Record W2283331143 · doi:10.14288/1.0099743

Functions of western loanwords in Japanese newspaper articles

2009· article· en· W2283331143 on OpenAlexaff
Maiko Shimada

Bibliographic record

VenuecIRcle (University of British Columbia) · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLexicography and Language Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNewspaperHistoryAdvertisingBusiness

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Previous studies on Western loanwords in Japanese showed that they account for approximately 10 percent of the Japanese lexicon and their number is continuing to grow. This thesis examined the functions of Western loanwords in the language of newspaper articles. 3,844 occurrences of loanwords were collected from four consecutive issues of Yomiuri Shinbun Satellite Edition published in April 2001 and classified into four main functional categories. The four main functional categories were "technical terms," "lexical-gap-fillers," "elevating the images of the referents," and "replacing the native vocabulary items." "Technical terms" were terminologies used specifically in certain fields such as sports, politics, medicine, etc., regardless of their familiarity among the general public. "Lexical-gap-fillers" could be divided into two types: those which denoted novel objects or concepts ("true LGFs") and those which filled lexical gaps by having either broader or more specific meanings than native terms ("semi-LGFs"). The loanwords in the "elevating the images of the referents" function could either have stylistic effects or a euphemistic role depending on the connotations of native equivalents. If a loanword replaced the native equivalent with a neutral connotation, it created a better image by adding stylishness, prestige, casualness, etc. On the other hand, if the native term had negative connotation, then the loanword functioned as a euphemism to conceal the a negativity. "Replacing native equivalents" could be divided into three stages according to the degrees of replacement. The loanwords in the earliest stage functioned as synonyms of the native equivalents. The next stage included loanwords that are used more commonly than their native counterparts in everyday language. The loanwords in the most advanced stage have almost completely replaced the native terms, which have become obsolete. The quantitative analysis of the above functions showed that "lexical-gap-fillers" was the most prevalent function (45.08%). This result was contradictory to the result from Takashi's (1990a) quantitative study on functions of English loanwords in advertisement texts, which revealed that the main function was to create better images of referents. Thus, this thesis concluded that the most prominent function of loanwords is different depending on text styles and purposes.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.841
Threshold uncertainty score0.871

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.012
GPT teacher head0.171
Teacher spread0.159 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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