Bailey just asked me what the difference between 回収 (kaishū) and 収集(shūshū) is—two words that would both map to the English verb “collect.” I intuitively came up with a hypothesis to explain the distinction:
回収 may take things away from others when collecting while 収集 does not have that implication.
Things that you 回収 may have been previously distributed by the actor themself while 収集 does not have that implication.1
Not content with armchair theorizing, however, I decided to take advantage of one of the largest corpora in the world: Google.2 To test my hypothesis, I chose two “objects of collection”, one you can take away (and often is distributed first) and one you can’t take away: アンケート (ankēto “survey,” from the French inquête) and 意見 (iken “opinion”). I then took the four resulting collocations3 on Google in quotes (“•”) and recorded how many hits there were.
This second point could also be hypothesized based on the component meaning of 回, which in the verb 回る (mawa=ru) can mean “circle back.” ↩
Google is of course a huge corpus but it has very limited search and can easily be misused and misunderstood, thus making Google an unreliable (unprofessional) source for statistical data. One Google alternative for some different statistics is the n-gramdata they offer for research. ↩
”Collocation” on Wikipedia says: “Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.” ↩
Bailey just pointed me to a hilarious series of videos apparently introducing Japanese culture to foreigners, produced by the Japanese comedians Rahmens. Rahmens are incidentally the ones who play Mac and PC in the Japanese versions of the Apple ads.
From Rands in Repose’s Nerd Handbook, probably a good guide for Bailey (though I don’t quite fit the target completely):
But in nerds’ bit-based work, progress is measured mentally and invisibly in code, algorithms, efficiency, and small mental victories that don’t exist in a world of atoms.
I feel this phenomenon exists in formal linguistics as well, where the elegance of an analysis may be measured in theory-internal terms. It’s hard to get other people excited when they don’t share that same background, precisely as there is no physical manifestation of an analysis. At least Bailey’s good about listening, trying to understand, and being happy for me. ^^
I heard Steven Pinker on NPR! Remind me to tell you about it (unless my excitement is not mutual).
I wanted to call in and say “thanks so much for making linguistics accessible and interesting to us laypeople, I love the work that you do; my boyfriend recently received his Master’s in linguistics, but the stuff he works on is syntax in Mandarin Chinese, and it’s completely impenetrable.” But I didn’t. <3
