1992 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
A Computer-assisted Study of Participles in Early Modern English
| Project/Area Number |
03610238
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Research Field |
英語・英文学(アメリカ語･アメリカ文学)
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| Research Institution | Osaka University |
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Principal Investigator |
IMAI Mitsunori Osaka University Faculty of Language and Culture Professor, 言語文化部, 教授 (60034584)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1991 – 1992
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| Keywords | Elizabethan English Prose / Early Modern English / Participial Construction / History of English / Corpus Linguistics / Thomas Deloney / Thomas Nashe / John Lyly |
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of the present research is manifold: firstly, it aims at investigating into the use of participles in Elizabethan English prose. The type of participles investigated is the one called "free adjunct" or "nexus tertiary". The works investigated are: Thomas Deloney's Iacke of Newberie, Thomas Nashe's The Vnfortvnate Traveler, and John Lyly's Euphues.
Secondly, the present research tries to show 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 a 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 programmes have been written in 'Mil', a programming language of 'Mifes' (Megasoft, Osaka).
The database thus built from the prose by the three 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.
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