A Computer-assisted Study of Participles in Early Modern English

本研究的目的是多方面的，首先，它的目的是调查分词在伊丽莎白时代英语散文中的使用情况。它涉及的分词类型称为“自由附加词”或“关联第三级”。被调查的作品有：托马斯·德罗尼的《纽伯里的阿克克》、托马斯·纳什的《温弗特奈特旅行者》、约翰·莱利的《幼年》、《怀特的解剖》和菲利普·西德尼的《阿卡迪亚》。其次，目前的研究表明，使用光学字符阅读器可以轻松而准确地生成语料库，因为尽管现在可以访问越来越多的电子文本，但使用计算机数据库的英语语言学家有时可能会觉得有必要建立自己的语料库。这在一定程度上是因为现有语料库可能不包含它们需要的特定版本的特定文本。第三，本研究试图建立一种方法，通过该方法，使用个人计算机的新手可以容易地将语料库处理成数据库，他可以从数据库中检索对他的研究非常有用的各种项目。为此目的，用Mifes(Megasoft，Osaka)的编程语言Mil编写了许多程序。这样由四位作者从散文中建立的数据库已经搜索了例如与句子长度和用作自由附加语的分词在语料库中的出现有关的数据，结果表明在被检查的两个项目之间可能存在相关性。还从语篇分析的角度对句子前部使用的分词的逻辑主语进行了调查，其结果是，逻辑主语最常出现在前一句中最后一个主句或从句的主语中。

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.