Quantitative Analyses of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's Children's Literature

Abstract

In order to analyze the stylistic characteristics of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's children's literature, this study employs eight children's literature of Akutagawa as the research object. This research makes a quantitative analysis of lexical richness, lexical difficulty, sentence length, and syntactic complexity. Three research findings reveal that: Firstly, in terms of lexicon, the use of the words is simple in Akutagawa's children's literature, and the vocabulary richness is relatively low. Secondly, in terms of sentences, the syntactic complexity and average sentence length of Akutagawa's children's literature are lower than those of adult literature. Thirdly, it is clear that the stylistic characteristics of Akutagawa's children's literature reflect some extent the stylistic characteristics of children's literature in general. Therefore, the reading difficulty of Akutagawa's children's literature is lower than that of adult literature. This may be due to the fact that the author assumed his own children, his relatives' children, and the doctor's child as their direct readers.