A Computer-assisted Study of Participles in Early Modern English

本研究的目的是多方面的：首先，旨在探讨分词在伊丽莎白时代英语散文中的使用情况。考察的分词类型为“自由附加词”或“结点三级词”。被调查的作品有：Thomas Deloney的《Iacke of Newberie》，Thomas Nashe的《Vnfortwate Traveler》和John Lyly的Eupues。第二，本研究试图表明，使用光学字符阅读器可以轻松而准确地生成语料库，因为尽管现在越来越多的电子文本可以访问，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创建自己的语料库。这部分是因为现有的语料库可能不包括他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很容易地将语料库处理成数据库，他可以从数据库中检索出对他的研究非常有用的各种项目。为此目的，用Mifes(Megasoft，大阪)的一种编程语言‘Mil’编写了一些程序。对三位作者根据散文建立的数据库进行了搜索，以寻找与语料库中用作自由附加语的句子长度和分词的出现有关的数据，结果表明这两个项目之间可能存在相关性。

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.