Corpus Stylistics in Japan: Progress, Problems and Prospect

Corpus stylistics research in Japan mainly falls into two types:personal style study and genre study.Personal style study is mostly focused on literary writers, which has in due time given rise to research interest related with author identification and speculation of writing time, etc.Genre study includes studies of stylistic features and text classifier construction.In recent years, the objects of stylistics have expanded from literary works to non-literary texts such as academic papers, news reports and user feedbacks.The research field has been broadened to include, in addition to literature, education, political science, business management and criminology, etc.Indexes used are constantly enriched.Analysis methods continue to be innovated.The application of new methods such as inferential statistics and machine learning has effectively improved the effect of data analysis.However, research in this field still has room for improvement, with some problems to be solved, such as limited perspective, immature theory, inadequate basic data, and unsatisfactory technology.