Linguistic Analysis of Water/landslide Disaster Warnings

Abstract

This study collected water/landslide warnings from 56 autonomous bodies in Japan, categorized the warnings in “preparation”, “advisory”, and “directive” based on the urgency level, and linguistically analyzed them in terms of the number of sentences and phrases, requests, imperatives, single, compound, embedded clauses, relative clauses, passives, and types of information included in the warnings. After the analysis, the following results were found: 1) a warning is consisted of 5 sentences and 30∼34 phrases in average; 2) there is a proportional relationship between the syntactic complexity of language and urgency level; 3) evacuation acts are expressed in request sentences instead of imperatives in many of the warnings; 4) warnings include information about sender, receivers, urgency level, shelter, risks, and evacuation acts.