Variation in the use of innovative katakana in a Japanese corpus

要旨

This study assesses writer’s use of innovative katakana forms in texts in a corpus of written
\nJapanese and examines the effects of linguistic and social factors on the use of innovative katakana.
\nFocusing specifically on innovative katakana that represent sequences including /w/ and /v/
\nphones, one of the aims of the study is to investigate whether the presence of /w/ in the native
\nphonological system encourages the use of innovative /w/ forms in sequences that do not appear
\nin native lexical items. This is in contrast to forms containing /v/ which lack native counterparts in
\nany context in the Japanese phonological system. Another objective of this paper is to investigate
\nwhether the likelihood of using innovative katakana is affected by position within a word. Also,
\nthis research applied the framework of variationist sociolinguistics to identify which social factors
\nsignificantly affect the innovative writing behavior.
\nTo answers these questions, this study uses the data collected from the Chunagon database
\nfor descriptive analysis and multivariate analysis. The Chunagon corpus is a written corpus
\ncompiled by the National Institution of Japanese Language and Linguistics which contains
\napproximately 100 million words and includes texts published between the 1970's and the 2000's.
\nThe results show that the presence of native phones triggers a higher usage of innovative katakana
\nin loanword forms containing /w/ as compared to /v/ forms. The findings also indicate that
\ninnovative /w/ and /v/ forms occurred more often in word-initial position than in medial and final
\npositions. Concerning the social factors, the multivariate results show that there is no effect for age
\nand gender for the /w/ variable but for the /v/ variable, there is an effect of gender. Only the /v/
\nvariable showed expected innovative preference in informal (webs and books) genres whereas the
\n/w/ variable showed an unanticipated higher innovative usage in a formal register which comprises
\ngovernmental and legal genres. In sum, this study has presented some significant findings of
\nshowing linguistic reasons (the presence of native phone and the positional effect) that would
\nenhance the use of innovative katakana in written texts.

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