ポジショニング分析からみる｢協和語｣への起点言語の影響 = The influence of the language of origin on “Kyōwago” as seen in positioning analysis

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the Japanese colony of Manchuria, there was a contact language that has been called Kyōwa-go, which euphemistically means something like “the language of cooperation and harmony”. Up to now, quantitative analyses of this contact language has been limited to either its lexicon or its grammatical aspects, but we maintain that an understanding of the effects of two source languages requires the combining of these two linguistic aspects. We propose a new method for analyzing contact languages by examining both the lexical and grammatical aspects, and test this method out of Kyōwa-go.
Our methodology goes like this. First, we determine the relative influence of Japanese and Chinese on the vocabulary of Kyōwa-go by calculating the number of morpheme derived from each source language. Next, we determine the similarity of Kyōwa-go to each of the two Source Languages by calculating the number of steps required to “correct” Kyōwa-go back to Japanese and then Chinese. Finally, we plotted these two values along the x-axis and y-axis of a quadrant analysis graph, which we have dubbed a "Positioning Map." During this era, the Japanese military produced comical illustrated postcards with spoken dialogue, and for our linguistic data, we have used individual sentences from these postcards. In our results, we found that the sentences was distributed across the four quadrants of graph, though not evenly. Our postcard data can be said to lean heavily towards Japanese usage, but even in this data, the bias is only slight, and the influence of Chinese is clearly evident as well. Our methodological experiment and resulting “Positioning Map” may thus be deemed successful, because it allows us to see, in each individual sentence, the relative influence of the two Source Languages, in both the lexicon and the grammatical aspects.