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Paper short abstract

This presentation will discuss the challenges of place name annotation in (Old) Japanese corpora such as identifying place name borders and translating complex place names. A corpus-based investigation into the morphology of place names in (Old) Japanese will then be introduced.

Paper long abstract

This presentation is inspired by the author’s experience with place name annotation for the Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese (ONCOJ). In comparison with the Corpus of Historical Japanese I will discuss the challenges and possible solutions for place name annotation in (Old) Japanese corpus, as well as introduce a corpus-based investigation into morphology of place names in (Old) Japanese.

In the first part of my presentation, I will briefly describe the quantitative data and qualitative variety of place names in the corpus of Old Japanese (ONCOJ).

In the second part I will discuss what kind of linguistic challenges I met when annotating place names in the corpus. Specifically, I will talk about:

- Identifying boundaries and morphological structure of place names in Old Japanese texts (e.g., should 飛鳥川 ‘Asuka-gawa’ be treated as a place name ‘Asuka’ and a common noun ‘river’, or as a complex place name ‘Asuka-gawa’?)

- Dealing with ‘cranberry’ morphemes in Japanese place names (e.g. Kagu-yama)

Finally, based on the analysis of place names in the ONCOJ and in comparison with the Corpus of Historical Japanese, I will suggest my own typology of place names based on their morphological structure. I will also discuss the strategies that can be used when translating different types of complex place names.