【英語論文の書き方】第62回　大文字表記について論文翻訳・英文校正　研究者専門の翻訳会社　ワールド翻訳サービス

【英語論文の書き方】第62回　大文字表記について

2019年4月3日 10時00分

第61回では冠詞（a, an, the）の使い分けについて取り上げました。
日本語には冠詞がないため、英語を書く時に誰もが悩んだ経験があると思います。

第62（今回）のテーマは大文字表記についてです。
英語にはあって日本語にはないもの、それが大文字と小文字ですね。

では、なぜ大文字と小文字を使い分けるのでしょうか？

みなさんもご存知のように、大文字は、文の先頭にある単語や図表のタイトルに使われています。当たり前だと思うかもしれませんが、なぜ文字を大きくするのでしょうか？

次に、固有名詞の場合です。例えば、このメルマガの執筆者Geoffさんの名字であるHartという単語はすべて小文字でhartと書くと、どんな意味になるのでしょうか？

そして最後は、論文を書く際に特に気をつけたい略語の場合です。大文字にすべきか小文字にすべきか、迷った時はどうすればよいでしょうか？

例外の場合も取り上げていますので、こちらもあわせてご覧ください。

Capitalization By Geoffrey Hart

Western languages have a unique feature that is not used in Asian languages: capitalization. English uses distinctly different characters for capital letters (A, B, C, etc.) and lower-case letters (a, b, c, etc.), even though the capital and lower-case versions of a letter (e.g., A and a) serve the same role in pronunciation and spelling. English uses the two sets of characters in different ways. Although some differences seem arbitrary, most are useful because they communicate information about a word’s meaning and its role in a sentence. In this article, I’ll discuss those roles. Applying these rules in order, from the first one to the last, will help you determine whether to capitalize a word.

First and most obviously, the word at the start of sentence, figure caption, or table title is capitalized. Because the capital letter rises above the other letters in the sentence, it is visibly distinctive and provides a clear visual indicator of the start of the sentence. When our eyes move back and forth during the process of reading, this distinctive shape and size makes it easier to recognize the end of one sentence and the start of the next one. This is important for cognition, because it sends the following message: “stop reading now and decide what the sentence means before you examine the next sentence”. This process occurs subconsciously, but it explains why English writing does not rely entirely on punctuation such as periods (.) or colons (:) to identify the end of a sentence. Providing two visual cues (with the capitalization cue more obvious because of its larger size) helps clarify the meaning as we read.

A related role of capitalization is to make headings stand out from the surrounding text. When all main words in a heading are capitalized, the variation between the heading’s tall capital letters and the shorter lower-case letters in subsequent paragraphs provides a clue that the heading serves a different role (i.e., identifying the start of a section) and does not function as an ordinary sentence. This approach is arbitrary, since headings are usually formatted differently from ordinary sentences: they are boldfaced, italicized, enlarged, or separated from the ordinary sentences by blank space. Because capitalization provides no useful additional information beyond this formatting, many journals only capitalize the first word of a heading. That also seems arbitrary, since the start and end of the heading is clear even if no word is capitalized. But for consistency with sentences, the first letter is traditionally capitalized.

Second, capitalization indicates words that are proper nouns (a person, place, or thing). A proper noun is the name of a specific person, a specific place, or a specific thing. The key is specific: a proper noun refers to something unique, and capitalizing its first letter clarifies this role. This contrasts with a common noun; because the latter is common, it is (by definition) not unique. For example, my family name (Hart) is capitalized because it refers to a specific family. The same word, but without capitalization (hart), refers to a male deer, of which there are many. Only the first letter of a proper noun is capitalized because words composed entirely of capital letters are more difficult to read, and their unusual size draws the eyes away from the rest of the text, slowing reading. Common nouns are formatted using lower-case letters to indicate that they have no special identity. For example, we would typically write “Biwa Lake” (with Lake capitalized) because there is only one lake with that name, but “a Japanese lake” or “several Japanese lakes” (with lake not capitalized) because we are not referring to one specific lake.

An important exception involves adjectives, which are words that describe a particular characteristic of the noun. For example, if Japan is a noun, Japanese is the corresponding adjective that describes the characteristic of being part of Japan, or originating in Japan. You could argue that because the adjective can be used to refer to many things that belong to or originate in Japan, it should be lower case (japanese). And indeed, in French and German, that is the standard practice. Unfortunately, English is not always logical.
The concept of uniqueness is also why book titles and the names of journals are usually capitalized both in the text and in the References section: they refer to one specific book or journal. Unfortunately, in another example of the illogic of English, the titles of journal papers are generally not capitalized, even though each paper is a unique thing.

The final capitalization rule relates to abbreviations that replace multi-word phrases. In English, we most commonly use the first letter or syllable of each word in a phrase to form the abbreviation; each letter or syllable then represents one word in the longer phrase, making it easier to remember. Because this approach use the initial (first) letter of each word, the resulting abbreviation is called an initialism. If the abbreviation can be pronounced as a word rather than as a series of individual letters, it is called an acronym. As in the case of proper nouns, the abbreviation is usually (but not always) capitalized to make it stand out as a distinct object. When in doubt, consult a recent issue of the journal that will review your paper to learn their preferences. For example, many forestry journals abbreviate diameter at breast height as DBH, but others use dbh because the letters in the original phrase are not capitalized. Neither approach is inherently superior, so follow the journal’s preference.

For abbreviations that are acronyms, there’s an additional complication. If the abbreviation refers to a proper noun, it is almost always capitalized. For example, the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration is abbreviated NASA because there is only one such organization. In contrast, if the abbreviation refers to a common noun, it is usually not capitalized. For example, light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation (laser) is not capitalized. Needless to say, different journals have different preferences. For example, I have seen light detection and ranging abbreviated as LIDAR, lidar, or LiDAR; in the last case, the “i” is lower-case because it is not the start of a word in the original phrase.

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【英語論文の書き方】第62回 大文字表記について 論文翻訳・英文校正 研究者専門の翻訳会社 ワールド翻訳サービス