｢現代日本語書き言葉均衡コーパス｣(BCCWJ)を利用した｢くらい｣・｢ぐらい｣の研究

概要

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This paper aims to reveal some aspects of the usages of "kurai" and "gurai" in Japanese based on analysis of Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ). The dictionary descriptions and previous studies on these words assume that "kurai" and "gurai" are interchangeable in any context. If this assumption is correct, their distributions in any corpus should be at the (almost) same ratio; however, the present study shows that this is not the case. The occurrence of "kurai" exceeds that of "gurai" in written materials, but the opposite is true in spoken data (the Diet Record). Moreover, the result of the analysis reveals that (i) "dono-kurai" was the cooccurring pairs of words with highest frequency, (ii) "kurai" is hardly followed by the objective case marker "o", and (iii) there are some usages which are close to "nado" rather than "hodo", which has been discussed as close to "kurai" and "gurai" in previous studies.