DONALD
ROSS
210L Lind Hall, (612) 625-5585
rossj001@tc.umn.edu
Department of English, University of Minnesota
"The Use of Word-Class Distribution Data for Stylistics: Keats's
Sonnets and Chicken Soup," Poetics, 6 (1977), 169-96.
Systematic and objective descriptions of texts' surface structures are necessary
for analysis of style. One approach to syntax has been first to parse the text,
then to count the proportions of word-classes. Simply computing the proportions
(or percentages) does not allow valid comparison among texts, because the large
proportion of one class will reduce the others. Furthermore, the classes are not
equally likely to occur. It has been possible to select thirteen basic measures
that assume linguistic relations among classes, e.g., the ratio of adjectives
to nouns or auxiliary to main verbs, or that identify options, e.g., the distribution
of nominal phrases between those with nouns or pronouns as heads. The values of
the basic measures are considered to be statistically and linguistically independent,
and ordinary tests can measure the significance of differences between texts.
The computer algorithm which does the the parsing cross-classifies words by their
category (noun, adjective, auxiliary verb, etc.), and function (subject, complement,
predicate, etc.). A style can be further defined by whether the constituents of
nominal phrases with various functions are the same or not. The procedure is illustrated
by data from Keats's sonnets and odes, Blake's Songs, and a data base representing
other literary texts.
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