2020 Volume 32 Issue 7 Pages 419-435
This paper examines the use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for measuring and clustering the stylistic information of adverbs. The target items were basic adverbs for Japanese learners and semantically synonymous adverbs that serving different stylistic functions. There were 164 items, in total. The standardized frequency of each adverb in 14 genres of BCCWJ was calculated, and then a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) are conducted. Using the two primary principal component scores, the adverbs were divided into groups. An axis of “Bidirectional versus Unidirectional” was obtained as PC1 and an axis of “Self-Expression versus Public Announcement” was obtained as PC2. This result matches that of stylistic study of English (Biber 1988). Adverbs were divided into four groups with the two axes: Group A “Adverbs for self-expression”, Group B “Adverbs for Public Expression”, Group C1 “Adverbs for Sophisticated Communication”, and Group C2 “Basic Adverbs for Daily Communication (Basic).” Thus, this analysis can divide synonymous adverbs into stylistically different groups.
