語義記述の現実と理想

要旨

Professor Izuru Shinmura largely contributed to the progress of Japanese Linguistics, and his talents were manifested in many fileds. Above all, he was interested in the research of lexicology, and his name is widely known as the editor of “<B>KOJIEN</B>”.<BR>Modern Japanese dictionaries are generally incomplete in defining words. For instance they interpret the verb “tsukamu” using the verb “nigiru”, and the verb “nigiru” using the verb “tsukamu” reversely. But there is a sharp distinction between the sememe of “tsukamu” which means “to take hold of something suddenly and forcefully” and the sememe of “nigiru” which means “to tighten”. Japanese dictionaries do not describe these sememes of words but only list every contextual meaning of words. Such descriptions will increase to an unlimited extent, because the modification of contextual meaning of every word will be infinite. And they will not be available for understanding the possible expressions in the future. We must strive for difining the sememe of every word in our dictionaries however hard task it may be.