Recently, I’ve been playing with Japanese V+V compound verbs (verbs consisting of two verbs V1 and V2, where V1 is in 連用形, i.e. the “-masu stem” or i-stem). Basically, I’ve extracted all occurrences of such verbs from post-war works¹ found in Aozora Bunko, and computed some quantitative information about them. If you want to know more details about what I’ve done, what data I used, why I did it, and what I’d like to do next, here’s a short report about it (in Japanese):

現代日本語のコーパス：複合動詞の研究に向けて (PDF)

In addition to the background information, the report also contains some interesting quantitative results not mentioned here. Hopefully I will write more about this in English later.

Lists with number of occurrences (tokens) follow. You can also browse all the sentences in which the compound verbs occur.

If you want to use or reproduce any of the data, please contact me.

50 most common V2 verbs

The numbers indicate number of tokens (i.e. occurrences, only those on the second position of a compound verb are counted). Note: While simple orthographic variants have been coalesced whenever possible using information from the EDICT2 dictionary, ambiguous forms are still counted separately to avoid any confusion. The following two cases are most conspicuous:

• 〜切れる is mostly a potential form of 〜切る, but sometimes it actually is the verb with dictionary form 〜切れる.
• 〜上る often means 〜あげる (usually written 〜上げる), but sometimes it also means 〜のぼる.

(This also applies to the list of whole compound verbs.)

〜出す 3569, 〜始める 2373, 〜得る 2240, 〜込む 1678, 〜合う 1362, 〜続ける 1016, 〜切る 1011, 〜掛ける 951, 〜上げる 818, 〜上る 774, 〜過ぎる 764, 〜付ける 620, 〜切れる 604, 〜回る 532, 〜兼ねる 480, 〜掛かる 442, 〜回す 416, 〜取る 378, 〜出る 343, 〜付く 305, 〜終わる 293, 〜上がる 280, 〜去る 273, 〜遣る 228, 〜直す 228, 〜止める 220, 〜立つ 217, 〜立てる 211, 〜尽くす 208, 〜捨てる 206, 〜抜く 206, 〜落とす 192, 〜返す 190, 〜治す 188, 〜起こす 169, 〜寄せる 163, 〜合わせる 160, 〜入る 155, 〜入れる 146, 〜替える 145, 〜見る 133, 〜落ちる 131, 〜果てる 131, 〜殺す 121, 〜待つ 110, 〜集める 106, 〜歩く 105, 〜通す 102, 〜比べる 101, 〜合わす 101

Total token count: 35221 (all verbs, not just the top 50). (This is at the same time the total token count of all compound verbs and token count of all V2 verbs occurring within them. Verbs made up of three and more components, such as 見回し始める, are counted two and more times, e.g. once as 見回す = 見る + 回す and once as 見回し始める = 見回す + 始める, both being valid occurrences of a compound verb.)

Full list (text file, UTF-8).

50 most common compound (V+V) verbs

Note: All 〜する verbs are counted as as a single verb 為る/し. The note for the previous list applies too.

Compound verb	V1.V2	Number of tokens
有り得る	有る.得る	483
し得る	為る.得る	479
し始める	為る.始める	391
歩き出す	歩く.出す	303
言い出す	言う.出す	291
思い出す	思う.出す	239
泣き出す	泣く.出す	187
見回す	見る.回す	182
笑い出す	笑う.出す	178
考え込む	考える.込む	151
し合う	為る.合う	148
歩き回る	歩く.回る	135
起き上る	起きる.上る	127
し続ける	為る.続ける	127
し切る	為る.切る	126
言い掛ける	言う.掛ける	122
出来上る	出来る.上る	107
成り得る	成る.得る	106
引っ張り出す	引っ張る.出す	97
駆け付ける	駆ける.付ける	95
通り過ぎる	通る.過ぎる	93
分かり切る	分かる.切る	85
思い浮かべる	思う.浮かべる	85
疲れ切る	疲れる.切る	82
遣り出す	遣る.出す	82
辿り付く	辿る.付く	80
見比べる	見る.比べる	78
向かい合う	向かう.合う	76
見上げる	見る.上げる	73
駆け込む	駆ける.込む	71
し過ぎる	為る.過ぎる	71
成り掛ける	成る.掛ける	67
取り掛かる	取る.掛かる	67
黙り込む	黙る.込む	67
起ち上る	起つ.上る	67
言い切れる	言う.切れる	66
突き止める	突く.止める	66
見守る	見る.守る	66
為し得る	為す.得る	65
飛び上る	飛ぶ.上る	63
持ち出す	持つ.出す	61
し兼ねる	為る.兼ねる	60
し出す	為る.出す	60
取り出す	取る.出す	60
書き始める	書く.始める	59
有り過ぎる	有る.過ぎる	58
焼け残る	焼ける.残る	57
呼び止める	呼ぶ.止める	57
知り得る	知る.得る	57
照らし出す	照らす.出す	56

Full list (text file, UTF-8).

Compound verbs in context (usage examples)

Here are browsable pages with sentence contexts extracted from the Aozora Bunko works (including links to the respective works). The second file is a subset of the first one. Spaces (not present in the original works) indicate morpheme boundaries.

• All verbs (HTML, 11.2 MB)
• “Directional” verbs (i.e. where V2 seems to indicate upward, downward, inward or outward direction) (HTML, 2.6 MB)

If you want to use or reproduce any of the data, please contact me.

Related Links

• Compound Verb Lexicon at NINJAL, an effort led by Kageyama Tarō, provides classification, definitions and examples of common lexical compound verbs as well as background info (in English and Japanese). It has links to the BCCWJ corpus for most of them, but the database itself does not contain frequency information.

• Morphological Analysis of Japanese at NINJAL: you can try it online, it uses MeCab and various versions of UniDic, or alternatively IPAdic.

• Papers available online:

  • Asao Yoshihiko (2007) 複合語の生産性と文法的性質 (in Japanese, “Productivity and Grammatical Nature of Compound Verbs”).
  • Harald Baayen’s home page hosts most of his publications about morphological productivity.
  • Himeno Masako’s papers at the TUFS repository, on which a large part of her book on compound verbs (複合動詞の構造と意味用法 = The Structure, Meaning and Usage of Compound Verbs) is based.
  • Tamaoka Katsuo et. al (2004) Entropy and Redundancy of Japanese Lexical and Syntactic Compound Verbs.

See my report (Japanese, PDF) for more pointers to information and some discussion of the papers above.