This study attempts to describe the communicative function of ne seen in recent years based on an analysis of Sonandesune and ndesukane which are composite forms with ne. Specifically, we compared the usage rates of both composite forms using multiple recorded conversation corpora. The comparison of the corpus released in the 2010s with those released in the 2000s clarified that (1) the use of Sonandesune exceeds Sonandesuka when receiving information and (2) the use of ndesukane when asking a question is increasing slightly. Based on these results, we considered the communicative function of ne seen in recent years to be “the speaker is clearly indicating to the listener that s/he intends to maintain a conversation with them.” Our conclusion is that the increasing use of ne is due to the pragmatic motivation to express the speaker’s intention “to continue the conversation” and aim to build a harmonious relationship with the listener.

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We constructed the Japanese Topic-Oriented Conversation Corpus (J-TOCC) in order to study the influence of topics on the vocabulary, grammar, and discourse strategies in conversation. The main feature of this corpus is that the topics are fixed. University students were asked to engage in conversation of 15 topics, and each conversation was recorded for precisely 5 minutes. This means that conditions other than the topic are controlled. Eleven topics are related to daily life, and four topics are related to society. In total, 120 pairs participated, so 10 hours of conversation were recorded for each topic. J-TOCC contains about 1.6 million words in total. The pairs were balanced in terms of gender combination and recording site. In addition, speakers’ degrees of familiarity on each topic were surveyed and the data are attached to the corpus.

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Generally, data can be categorized as qualitative and quantitative, but besides that, data can be analyzed from a quantitative viewpoint or a non-quantitative viewpoint. This paper summarizes the analysis of Japanese language studies from a quantitative point of view, referring to various perspectives, including usage examples, corpus, and multi-person questionnaire-based surveys. It also points out that quantitative analysis is a major analytical method in Japanese language studies that is commonly used in a variety of other academic fields. This paper also explains statistics by breaking it down into descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and exploratory statistics. Furthermore, it defines the differences between statistical studies and quantitative studies. While statistical studies require theoretical and fundamental methods of data analysis, quantitative studies use applied and practical data analysis methods. When conducting quantitative linguistic research, great emphasis is placed on the investigation. Therefore, the importance of investigation planning and interpretation of the outcomes when conducting an investigation is also discussed in this paper.

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