The polysemy of the Japanese temperature adjective atsui

Abstract

This study adopts a corpus-based behavioral profile approach to explore the semantic relationships among the senses of the Japanese temperature adjective atsui (‘hot’). As a result, the hierarchical cluster analysis represents the distributional (dis)similarity of the ten senses of atsui. Average silhouette width suggests a two-cluster interpretation, which reveals that senses derived from the same experience (sensory or subjective) tend to have similar usage characteristics. The discriminating properties of four subclusters and usage characteristics of each sense have been identified by means of computing t-values. Also, the structure of the hypothesized network has been represented based on the distributional (dis)similarity of the ten senses. The relationships among these ten senses and the usage characteristics identified in this study provide insight into Japanese lexicography. Moreover, as the first attempt to apply the behavioral profile to the investigation of Japanese polysemy, this study holds implications for lexical semantics in Japanese.