Research on conjunctions has developed around the nature of the connective relationship that shows how they connect contexts that come before and after them; however, we need to clarify not only the relationship but also the scope of connection – which parts of a text are connected by conjunctions – to describe the function of conjunctions in texts. Thus, the author analyzed the characteristics of the scope of the connection by examining 15 types of conjunctions used in humanities papers. The results revealed the following three points; first, it is possible to classify the 15 conjunctions into four types. In some cases, conjunctions that belong to the same connective relationship can be classified into a different type of scope, or those belonging to different connective relationships can be classified into the same scope type. Second, the characteristics of the internal structure in the scope, the degree of their grammaticalization, and whether there are any modifications to the preceding sentence affect the scope of conjunction. Third, when the scope is wide, scope of conjunction often contains multiple topics or the writer's the thought process leading to a conclusion.

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The study aims to clarify characteristics of skills of language expression that students need to acquire before going to university in Japan from the perspective of linguistic manipulation of words. Several assessments have revealed that Japanese students tend to have difficulties answering descriptive questions. Thus, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology has been focusing on the enhancement of the skills of writing logically. However, few studies in the field of language education have examined the skills required when students are evaluated as having the ability to construct texts logically. The linguistic manipulation of words such as rephrasing or complementing given texts for writing answers properly has not been investigated sufficiently. This paper examined model answers of the university entrance examinations and identified what type of linguistic manipulation the students were expected to learn in order to write “well-described” answers. The analysis revealed the model answers were constructed mainly by extracting phrases from text verbatim, paraphrasing a sentence or clause, taking out an appropriate word, and complementing necessary words to make a complete sentence. On the other hand, the linguistic manipulation of referencing the expression of the text itself remained only a small percentage.

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The "Kato Yasuhiko Mobile-mail Corpus" presented in this study is based on the corpus collected and created by the late KATO Yasuhiko between 2004 and 2010 at the Kato Yasuhiko Seminar, Department of Japanese Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters, Senshu University. As part of KATO's legacy, TANAKA Yukari and MIYAKE Kazuko were tasked with standardizing the corpus and making it publicly available for future research and were joined by MIYAZAKI Yumi and HAYASHI Naoki in undertaking this project. This corpus, which consists of 271,598 mobile-phone messages (462,874 lines) sent and received between 2001 and 2010, was compiled in xlsx format and made available in June 2023 by the Association for Language Resources as no. GSK2023-B (https://www.gsk.or.jp/catalog/). This corpus is distinct in that it contains data, collected over a decade, of actual messages sent and received by university students in the 2000s, when the use of mobile phone communication was rapidly expanding. In particular, the rich array of examples of historic pictogram usage and the inclusion of additional information such as the interactants’ backgrounds and degrees of intimacy will likely make this a valuable resource for future research.

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This paper clarified what significant differences are and the purpose of conducting significance tests in linguistic research. It also describes the characteristics of each test, summarizes the factors that affect the test results, and points out it to be considered in the analysis. Furthermore, the sampling technique of the data under consideration was also mentioned. Finally, the proper use and application of significance tests in linguistic research are discussed.

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