A Study Of Adjectives Based On Corpus Of Kenji Miyazawa’s Fairy Tales

Kenji Miyazawa is a famous Japanese poet and writer of fairy tales.Kenji’s fairy tales are very different from those of his contemporaries.His works have been selected as Mandarin textbooks in primary and secondary schools and even high schools by many publishing houses.Taking the adjectives in 21 fairy tales of Kennji Miyazawa as the research objects,this thesis not only investigates the lexical information of adjectives by using the methods of static description and econometric statistics,but also studies the adjectives from five perspectives:etymology,degree of difficulty,flexible use,semantics and semantic orientation.The conclusions of this thesis are as follows:In Kennji Miyazawa’s fairy tales,the usage frequency of the first type adjectives is higher than that of the second type adjectives.And the usage frequency of adjectives is the highest in the teacher’s period,while that in the his sick time is the lowest.The adjectives are basically primary and intermediate Japanese words.It demonstrates that the adjectives used in kennji’s fairy tales are simple and easy to understand,which conforms to the language characteristics of fairy tales.However,some difficult words are also used,which reflects that for children,kennji’s fairy tales have a certain difficult side.The flexible forms are mainly conjoined and combined,and some flexible forms of individual words are used.This may be related to kennji being the first generation to receive modern Japanese standard language education.Adjectives are words that mainly express abstract relations and spiritual and behavioral characteristics.Words expressing abstract relations mainly describe quantity,situation,time and shape;words expressing spirit and behavior mainly showing psychological characteristics and behavior.When describing natural things,the use of color words is particularly significant.The common words of the Kenji’s five periods are words mainly expressing abstract relations and natural phenomena,and the special words are words mainly expressing spirit and behavior.The first type adjectives have three syntactic functions:attribute,adverbial and predicate.And the second type adjectives are mainly used as attribute and adverbial.When adjectives are used as attributives,subject nouns mainly refer to natural things and products,revolving fields like music,art,economy and military.The semantic direction when the adjectives as adverbial is mainly subject direction and action direction.The movements include sayou,sonnzai,etc.and the language and psychological activities are rich.The subjects involve people,animals,plants,monsters and gods.When adjectives are used as predicates,they describe various subjects,natural things,abstract relations,etc.