A Computer-Aided Comprehensive Study of English Style from Old English to Present-day English

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The purpose of the research is to make a comprehensive study of English style from Old English to Present-day English by using an electronic database. The database used consists mainly of commercially available databases, but we constructed a database for a specific purpose when necessary. Drawing on the electronic database each of our researchers has made the following achievements in the past four years.Shinichiro Watanabe worked on the style of Present-day English : he published papers on some grammatical and lexical features of rhyming slang, which is now widely used, and not regionally restricted, and on the role of repetition in English stylistics.Mitsunori Imai studied the style of Middle English ; specifically he published works including those on the role of repetition in Middle English poems and the problem of how a line begins in Middle English merical romances.Hideki Watanabe worked on the style of Old English ; he published papers including those on Beowulf, aspects of meaning of the OE noun-verb combination, fixed formulaic expressions in OE, the Biblical phrase and words and examples in the OED derived from the characters of Shakespeare's plays.Ayako Ohmori studies the style of Modern English ; particularly she published papers on a variety of metaphorical expressions such as earth, air, water and fire metaphor and addressed herself to the problem how these metaphors relate to cognition of the mind.Tomoji Tabata studied the style of Modern English prose, he published papers including those on methods for a corpus-based analysis, corpus stylistics, a case study of the style of Dickens' novels by analyzing the distribution of ly adverbs.We co-authored the book titled Approaches to Style and Discourse in English published from the Osaka University of Press in 2004, in which we published part of our achievements in our project.