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

本研究的目的是利用电子数据库对古英语到现代英语的文体进行综合研究。所使用的数据库主要由商业上可用的数据库组成，但我们在必要时为特定目的构建了数据库。利用电子数据库，我们的每位研究人员在过去四年中取得了以下成果。渡边信一郎（Shinichiro Watanabe）致力于研究现代英语的风格：他发表了关于押韵俚语的一些语法和词汇特征的论文，这些俚语现在被广泛使用，而且不受地域限制，他还发表了关于重复在英语文体学中的作用的论文。今井光典研究了中古英语的风格；具体来说，他出版了一些作品，包括关于中世纪英语诗歌中重复的作用以及中世纪英语幽默小说中一行是如何开始的问题。渡边秀树致力于古英语的风格；他发表的论文包括《贝奥武夫》、《OE名动组合的意义方面》、《OE中的固定公式表达》、《圣经》短语以及《牛津英语词典》中莎士比亚戏剧人物的词汇和例子。大森绫子研究现代英语的风格；特别是她发表了关于各种隐喻表达的论文，比如土，空气，水和火的隐喻，并致力于研究这些隐喻与心灵认知的关系。Tomoji Tabata研究现代英语散文的风格，他发表了《基于语料库的分析方法》、《语料库文体学》、《通过分析ly副词的分布来分析狄更斯小说的风格》等论文。2004年，大阪大学出版社出版了《英语文体与语篇的方法》一书，我们在书中发表了我们项目的部分成果。

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.