Japanese Compound Words Formed by The Lexeme ‘Ear’: A Morphological Study
Keywords:
linguistics, morphology, compound, JapaneseAbstract
In Japanese, there are frequently used characters in compound words. One is the kanji character ? which reads "mimi" and can be translated into ‘ear’. Although the lexeme “mimi” means ‘ear’ and functions as a noun, it can take on various forms and meanings when coupled with other lexemes. As a result, the main objective of this study is to examine the forms and meanings of Japanese compound words formed by the lexeme ‘ear’. The data was collected from the Japanese corpus from Tsukuba Web Corpus using observation and note-taking techniques. Then the data was analyzed using the identity method. The theory used to analyze the construction and meaning of Japanese compounds is the morphology theory by Katamba (1993), Tsujimura (1996), and Kageyama (2016). The results of this research show that there are 20 Japanese compound words formed with the lexeme "mimi." These compounds consist of two lexemes, with "mimi" either appearing first, followed by different words, or at the end of the compound. The combinations include compound nouns (N+N, V+N, and N+V), compound adjectives (N+ADJ and N+V), and compound verbs (N+V). Based on their meanings, the compounds can be divided into two categories: endocentric and exocentric compounds.