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A survey of grammatical variability in Early Modern English drama
Language and Literature ( IF 0.674 ) Pub Date : 2020-08-29 , DOI: 10.1177/0963947020949440
Andrew Hardie 1 , Isolde van Dorst 2
Affiliation  

Grammar is one of the levels within the language system at which authorial choices of one mode of expression over others must be examined to characterise in full the style of the author. Such choices must however be assessed in the context of an understanding of the extent of variability that exists generally in the language. This study investigates a set of grammatical features to understand their variability in Early Modern English drama, and the extent to which Shakespeare’s grammatical style is distinct from or similar to that of his contemporaries in so far as these features are concerned. A review of prior works on Shakespeare’s grammar establishes that the quantitatively informed corpus linguistic approach utilised in this study is innovative to this topic.

Using two of the grammatically annotated corpora created by the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project, one made up of Shakespeare’s plays, one of plays by other playwrights of the period, we present a method which steers a course between the narrow focus of close reading and the naïvely quantitative metrics of authorship analysis. For a set of 15 grammatical features of stylistic interest, we retrieve all instances of each feature in each play via complex corpus search patterns and calculate its relative frequency. These results are then considered, in aggregate and at the text level, to assess the differences across plays, across dramatic genre, and between Shakespeare and the other dramatists, via both statistical summary and visual representation of variability.

We find that Shakespeare’s grammatical style tends (especially in comedies and tragedies) to disprefer informationally dense noun phrases relative to the other playwrights; and, moreover, to prefer tense, aspect and pronoun features which suggest a greater degree of narrative focus in his style. Furthermore, we find Shakespeare to be highly distinct in his preferences regarding verb complement subordinate clause types. These findings point the way both to a novel methodology and to further as yet unconsidered questions on the subject of Shakespeare’s grammatical style.



中文翻译:

早期现代英语戏剧的语法变异性研究

语法是语言系统中的一种级别,在这种级别中,必须检查一种表达方式相对于其他表达方式的作者选择,以充分体现作者的风格。但是,必须在理解该语言通常存在的可变性的范围内评估这些选择。这项研究调查了一组语法特征,以了解它们在现代早期英语戏剧中的变异性,以及就这些特征而言,莎士比亚的语法风格在何种程度上有别于或与其同时代的莎士比亚相似。对莎士比亚语法的先前著作的回顾表明,本研究中使用的定量信息语料库语言学方法对该主题具有创新性。

我们使用莎士比亚语言百科全书计划创建的两种带有语法注释的语料库,其中一种是莎士比亚的戏剧作品,另一种是该时期其他剧作家的戏剧作品,我们提出了一种方法,可以在狭窄的阅读焦点和阅读焦点之间找到方向。天真的定量指标的作者分析。对于一组15个具有风格兴趣的语法特征,我们通过复杂的语料库搜索模式检索每个剧本中每个特征的所有实例,并计算其相对频率。然后,通过统计摘要和可视化表示形式,从整体上和文本层面考虑这些结果,以评估戏剧之间,戏剧风格之间以及莎士比亚与其他戏剧家之间的差异。

我们发现莎士比亚的语法风格倾向于(特别是在喜剧和悲剧中)相对于其他剧作家不喜欢信息密集的名词短语。而且,更喜欢时态,方面和代词特征,这暗示了他的叙事风格更加集中。此外,我们发现莎士比亚是高度在他的喜好有关动补从句类型不同。这些调查结果指向的方式既新颖的方法,并进一步作为莎士比亚的语法的主题风格又未考虑到的问题。

更新日期:2020-08-29
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