ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an exploratory investigation into reduction of disfluency in Japanese texts, which emerges as patterns of distantly co-occurring connectives. Based on a corpus of 19,002 editorials from Asahi Shimbun and using Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) combined with transition probability (TP) as association metrics, numerous statistically significant co-occurring pairs of connectives were identified. These findings are largely corroborated by evaluations from Japanese native speakers. The observed co-occurrence patterns, which may vary depending on the analytical criteria, are interpreted as formulaic strategies of written discourse and are considered to be intrinsically related to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.
