2011 Volume 28 Issue 1 Pages 21-26
Quantitative analyses on the comma as a punctuation mark in Japanese sentences have indicated data on the characters that commas follow have different features by writers’ individual trait and state components. In the present study, we classified 10 famous literary works written by Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), who is known to suffer from recurrent neurasthenia, using hierarchical cluster analysis and principal component analysis based on the characters that precede commas. From our findings of the classification of the literary works, we would suppose that the use of commas in the literary works was associated with the writer’s periodic exacerbations and remission of the neurasthenia.
