『源氏物語』においての美的語彙の役割 -系列化によるクラウドマップ分析-

Abstract

Japanese language is known for its rich aesthetic words. The Tale of Genji offers varied collection of aesthetic words which makes it one of the most important writings in Japanese ancient literature. Different words play different roles in people's perception of the theme when they read literature written in a specific language; aesthetic words should create an emotional state of mind. This study categorizes 105 aesthetic words from ancient Japanese literature into five groups to develop a tentative scale of emotion called G-scale. Then the G-scale is paired with another scale called E-scale designed to show the degree of emotionality of the themes of chapters in the Tale of Genji. 1,756 pairs of G-scale and E-scale are mapped on the XY-plot to create a "cloud-map" for each of five different groups of ancient Japanese aesthetic words. The result shows that chapters with high emotion (i.e. high E-scale) have higher frequencies for groups of aesthetic words with high emotionality (i.e. high G-scale). This suggests that aesthetic words in Japanese language play a certain significant role in people's perceiving the themes of literature.