Seifart et al. (2010) and Seifart (2011) calculated the relative frequencies of nouns, pronouns, and verbs (noun-to-verb ratio, or NTVR) in spoken corpora of diverse languages, revealing drastic typological differences. Although the exact reasons for these differences remain unknown, Seifart and his colleagues' innovative line of research has uncovered a number of intriguing grammatical and discourse correlates. Based on statistical analyses of the part-of-speech (POS) tagged versions of panel data from the Okazaki Survey on Honorifics (OSH) (NLRI 1957, 1983, Abe 2010, Nishio et al. 2010, Sugito 2010a, b, Matsuda et al. 2012, Matsuda 2012, Matsuda et al. 2013, Inoue, Kim & Matsuda 2013), we claim that (1) NTVR remains stable for individuals after adolescence, indicating that it is a reliable typological index; (2) NTVR exhibits variation based on speaker sex, with male speakers showing higher values than females; and (3) this sex difference is traceable to a difference in the use of honorific verbs, with female speakers using more auxiliary honorific verbs than male speakers. We conclude that while these results confirm the stability of NTVR within the lifespan of individual speakers, researchers should also take into account the sociolinguistic dimensions of a language when sampling data for NTVR research. Moreover, the analysis demonstrated that the POS-tagged version of the OSH data is a rich source of linguistic information that enables linguists to answer far more diverse questions than the original survey organizers intended.
形態素解析の大規模言語調査データへの応用 : 岡崎敬語調査パネルデータにおける名詞・代名詞・動詞の相対頻度数に対する話者性別効果の検証
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