Investigation and Analysis of Color Terms in Modern Japanese

摘要

This paper describes the investigation and analysis of color terms in modern Japanese. Japanese people use a large vocabulary of color terms in Japanese unconsciously in their daily life. The authors have studied the basic color terms. The color vocabulary was investigated for modern Japanese over 6 years, and in all 2,100 subjects participated in the vocabulary test. This paper shows the investigation process and analyzes the collected color vocabularies from various points of view. The vocabulary test is based on a questionnaire format without showing any color samples, where each subject was requested to answer the question items for color names in two levels of importance. Therefore we collected their recall color names without a priori clue such as color samples. The frequency of occurrence of the responded color names is statistically evaluated, and then the importance of color names is analyzed from various points of view.