「家族」に関する日本語語彙のカテゴリー化

The purpose of this study is to clarify the process of categorization in mind when Japanese speakers use the terms relating to a family or family members. This paper presents Japanese expressions composed of two parts: Hontoh-no (real / true) and family terms, Kazoku (family), Haha-oya (mother), Chichi-oya (father), Kodomo (child), Musume (daughter), and Musuko (son), and examines these expressions in the contexts in which they appear. Japanese Hontoh-no means that the topic is a real or true member of the category classified by the following word, and we can say categorization is happening here. The source of the data is the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), which was developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, and contains more than one hundred million words of contemporary written Japanese. Close examination of the examples of Hontoh-no and family terms in their contexts show that the term Hontoh-no represents two kinds of forces in categorization, “distinguishing force” from some standard to be a category member and “unifying force” aiming at some salient feature of the category. The “unifying force” applies more often to Kazoku (family) and Haha-oya (mother), than to other family terms, Chichi-oya (father), Kodomo (child), Musume (daughter), and Musuko (son). This fact indicates that “family” and “mother” have clearer ideal images than other family members like “father” or “children” in Japanese society.