Digitizing and Stylistic Analysis of Dramatic Speeches

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25580106
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Kyoto Seibo College
• Principal Investigator: NOSE Takuji 京都聖母女学院短期大学, 児童教育学科, 講師 (70626837)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 台詞の文体 / コーパス文体論 / 英米演劇 / Eugene O'Neill / マニュスクリプト研究

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In the present study, I’ve made a corpus consisting of 43 dramas (approximately one million word tokens) created by Eugene O’Neill, as well as a corpus of two dramas (approximately sixty thousand tokens) by Somerset Maugham. These corpuses are regarded as effective basic data for stylistic analysis of dramatic speeches. Lexical and syntactic information gained from the corpus make it possible to conduct diverse levels of analyses that help not only to illustrate characteristic differences in styles between two different types of speech, such as dialogical speech and thought aside; but to examine what linguistic manipulation a playwright performs to make a speech vivid and impressive in the given context of a dialogue in order to project a character’s hidden conflict of his/her mind. In addition, I conducted manuscript research of O’Neill’s dramatic works at Beinecke Library at Yale that provided me with quite important manuscripts for stylistic analysis.

Free Research Field

英米演劇の台詞の文体