Abstract

We investigate the distribution of content words in Thucydides to shed light on his famous ability to construct a perspectivally rich narrative. Following de Jong's narratological study of Homer we define as character language words that occur predominantly in character text (direct speech reports). When such words do—infrequently—appear outside character text, they are often to be interpreted as conveying a character's perspective. We apply the same reasoning to Thucydides, but proceed in a highly automated way: we look at the relative frequencies of all words in character and narrator text and we identify character language as those words whose distribution is the most skewed. Our lemmatizer Glem makes it possible to do this at the level of the lemma. It turns out that there indeed is such a class of character language in Thucydides, many words of which are evaluative. Manually investigating the rare occurrences of character language in narrator text reveals that Thucydides uses character language not only as a perspectivization device, but also for authorial comments. In a second stage we identify chapters in narrator text where character language expressions cluster and show them to be passages with interesting perspectival shifts or special dramatic intensity. Interestingly, the passage ranking highest on character language density is chapter 84 of book 3, the authenticity of which has been long doubted. Our study provides a novel approach to narratological questions, and also contributes to a linguistic debate on the nature of perspective dependence.

中文翻译：

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修昔底德的叙事者语言和品格语言：叙事视角的定量研究

摘要

我们研究了修昔底德语中内容词的分布，以阐明他构造一个视角丰富的叙事的著名能力。在De Jong对荷马的叙事学研究之后，我们将定义为主要出现在字符文本中的字符语言单词（直接语音报告）。当此类字词（不经常）出现在字符文字之外时，通常应解释为传达字符的观点。我们将相同的推理应用于修昔底德，但以高度自动化的方式进行：我们观察字符和叙述者文本中所有单词的相对频率，并将字符语言识别为分布最偏斜的单词。我们的lemmatizer格莱姆使得可以在引理级别进行此操作。事实证明，修昔底德确实存在这样的一类字符语言，其中许多单词是有评价的。手动调查叙述者文本中很少出现的字符语言表明，修昔底德不仅将字符语言用作透视手段，而且还将其用于作者评论。在第二阶段，我们在叙述者文本中识别字符语言表达聚集的章节，并将其显示为具有有趣的视角转变或特殊戏剧性强度的段落。有趣的是，在文字语言密度上排名最高的文章是第三本书的第84章，其真实性一直受到质疑。我们的研究为叙事学问题提供了一种新颖的方法，