A Stylistic Analysis of Coordinative Conjunctions

Using “Comprehensive Searching System: KOTONOHA ”

Abstract

This article analyzes the occurrence of coordinative conjunctions in five spoken corpora and five written corpora by utilizing the “Comprehensive Searching System: KOTONOHA,” a function of the corpus searching web-application “Chuunagon.” Principal component analysis was conducted on the results of the corpus survey in order to visualize the relationship among 10 genres as well as to describe each conjunction. Consequently, 10 genres were divided into 4 clusters. “Workplace Conversation” and “Simulated Public Speaking” are in one cluster, while the two conversation corpus known as NUCC and CEJC belong to another cluster. “Academic Presentation Speech” is in the same cluster as “Newspaper” or “Minutes of the Diet.” Furthermore, four groups of conjunctions which are specific to each cluster are found to correspond to the four groups of conjunctions in previous studies that analyzed conjunctions from the perspective of meaning and usage.