한일 고빈도 어휘의 특징에 관한 일고찰

Abstract

In this article, we first point out that the issue of “covering rate” in Japanese and Korean results from the analyses of materials with different conditions, and show that if such conditions are taken into consideration, there is no large discrepancy concerning the “covering rate” except for highly frequent words. We then analyze factors of this observed pattern. We selected the top frequent 500 words and analyzed them in terms of frequency distributions concerning word types, parts-of-speech, and semantic domains. The main result is summarised as follows. The majority of the highly frequent words in Korean are native words (word type), and the frequency rates of “11 class” and “20 human” pronouns (semantic domain), and adnominal words and verbs (part-of- speech) as well as aspect-related adjectives and adverbs are higher than those of the Japanese counterparts. On the other hand, the majority of the highly frequent words in Japanese are “kango,” or Chinese-derived words. In particular, compared with the Korean words examined, a wider variety of suffixes is found in Japanese and their frequency rates are also higher.