Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for Corpus Development, NINJAL
Department of Corpus Studies, NINJAL
Technical Assistant, Center for Corpus Development, NINJAL
Department of Corpus Studies, NINJAL
In this paper, we report the characteristics of the writing style called "addressing the reader" found in books. For this study, we used the Library Sub-corpus contained in the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ). In performing a stylistic analysis of the corpus, we used the information annotated in the corpus and the comments of the annotators (namely, readers), as well as the word frequencies and contextual connections between words. We found that the "addressive" style is more common in texts written in a casual style, such as essays and blogs, and contains phrases used to address readers directly or ask them questions (as if the writer and the readers are having a dialogue). In books, however, this writing style can be found in instructive texts, mainly in so-called how-to or enlightening books. Therefore, expressions that readers intuitively consider "addressive" in nature are not always encountered in these texts. In this paper, we will show that when readers find that the text is "addressing" them, they are influenced by context-dependent expressions and their own presuppositions as participants.