Political Text Analysis Using Distributional Characteristics of Nouns

Abstract

This study explores the distributional characteristics of nouns of Japanese prime ministers' Diet ad-dresses for interpreting two political phenomena.Previous content analysis studies focused only on a few content words for interpreting social phenomena and stylistic studies used stylistic characteristics indepen-dent on content of the texts with the aim of detecting their authors, genres, and chronological variations. This study focused, instead of these features, on distributional characteristics of nouns for better under-standing two political phenomena :a the difference between the two types of Diet addresses delivered by Japanese prime ministers, and, b the perceived changes made to these addresses by two powerful prime ministers.This study expands the aims and scopes of text analysis by showing the effectiveness of exploring these microscopic textual characteristics for interpreting political phenomena