現代日本語における｢ばか｣の用法変化

Abstract

This paper analyzes specific cases of <prefixization>, in which Japanese nouns change their meanings and functions to be used as prefixes. In the analysis, examples were retrieved from “The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese” (BCCWJ) online version (Chunagon), and the usage was analyzed. Including ‘Baka’, ‘Oni’ and ‘Kuso’ are used as nouns with negative meanings to express denial or insult people or things, when used as a prefix, their original negative meaning becomes quite rare and has gained a meaning that limits the degree of expression of the vocabulary. In previous studies, there has been no individual research on the meanings and functions of these terms, and no proper positioning has been made for the actual usage of ‘Baka’. Therefore, in this paper, we investigated ‘Baka’ as a case of <prefixing> of nouns, considered the process of semantic and functional changes from nouns to affixes as a grammaticalization phenomenon, clarifying the meaning and usage.