Stylistic analysis of Japanese prime ministers' diet addresses

Abstract

This study examines the speech styles used in the addresses of 27 Japanese prime ministers. As computational linguistics has developed, and many on-line corpora and new types of texts have been produced along with the growth of the Web, the statistical analysis of styles has expanded in scope. In an exploratory examination of the styles of prime ministers' Diet addresses, we clarified that the styles of the addresses reflect the general changes in Japanese usage and the individual styles of the prime ministers. This study indicates that stylistic methods are useful for historical analysis of political texts. They can be applied for more large-scale data and various research topics in humanities and social science. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.