Distant Co-occurrence Patterns of Connectives: a Corpus Study of Formulaicity in Japanese

Using corpus research methods, this study aims to establish whether there are two-item and, more generally, multi-item distant co-occurrence patterns of connectives in written Japanese, and further, to clarify the role these patterns play in discourse. The study is based on a hybrid corpus of written Japanese including Humanities and social science papers, Science and technology papers, and general written language data. The co-occurrence threshold was set at co-occurrence frequency > 10, PMI value > 2, and Dice coefficient > 0.01. The distribution of the observed co-occurring pairs differed according to the genre. Visualization of the connectivity potential of co-occurring pairs as directed graphs showed that these co-occurring pairs constitute longer co-occurrence chains which can be interpreted as ready-made co-occurrence patterns. Two-item and multi-item co-occurrence patterns are considered a type of Bourdieu’s habitus and contribute to both discourse development and discourse prediction.