A corpus-based approach to explore the stylistic peculiarity of Koji Uno’s postwar works

Abstract This research aims to investigate the peculiarity of the postwar works of Koji Uno, a prominent Japanese littérateur, through a quantitative comparative analysis with his contemporaries. Uno’s writing career was twice subjected to interruption, first due to mental illness and second due to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 2022-03, Vol.37 (1), p.168-184
Main Authors: Liu, Xueqin, Jin, Mingzhe
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Abstract This research aims to investigate the peculiarity of the postwar works of Koji Uno, a prominent Japanese littérateur, through a quantitative comparative analysis with his contemporaries. Uno’s writing career was twice subjected to interruption, first due to mental illness and second due to World War II. Literary critics hold the view that the unique writing style of Uno’s postwar works makes him easily distinguishable from other writers. However, it is difficult to understand the specificity of his writing without drawing comparison with his contemporaries. Therefore, this study conducted a comparative analysis to clarify the unique lexical and syntactic elements of Uno’s postwar works. As revealed by the analytical results, the most significant factors distinguishing Uno’s works from that of other writers comprise the exceptional application of conjunctions and symbols. Uno’s work shows more reliance on explicit conjunctions to connect sentences. He also inserted parenthetical annotations starting with such conjunctions as ‘つまり’ (in brief) and ‘あるいは’ (or) to enhance the readability of his sentences. Uno also employed punctuation marks, especially commas, to minimize the length of the element between punctuation marks.
ISSN:2055-7671
2055-768X
DOI:10.1093/llc/fqab029