| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
Fiscal Year 1994: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 1993: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of the present research is manifold ; firstly, it aims to investigate into the use of participles in Elizabethan English prose. It deals with the type of participles called "Free Adjuncts" or the ones in "Nexus Tertiary". The works investigated are : Thomas Deloney's Iacke of Newberie, Thomas Nash's the Vnfortvnate Traveler, John Lyly's Euphues, The Anatomy of Wyt, and Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Secondly, the present research shows that a corpus can be produced by using an Optical Character Reader with ease and accuracy, for though an increasing number of electronic texts are accessible today, English philologists using computerized databases may sometimes feel the necessity to create their own. This happens partly because existing corpora may not comprise particular texts of particular editions that they need. Thirdly, the present research attempts to establish a method by which a novice with a personal computer can easily process the corpus into a database from which he can retrieve a variety of items of great utility for his research. For this purpose a number of programs have been written in 'Mil', a programming language of 'Mifes' (Megasoft, Osaka).
The database thus built from the prose by the four authors has been searched for data relating, for example, to sentence length and the occurrence of participles used as free adjuncts in the corpus, with the result that indicates a possible correlation between the two items under examination.
An investigation from the point of view of discourse analysis has also been made as regards the logical subject of participles used in the front position of a sentence, with the result that the logical subject can most often be found in the subject of the last main or subordinate clause in the immediately preceding sentence.
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