A Computer-assisted Study of Participles in Early Modern English

本研究的目的是多方面的：首先，它旨在研究分词在伊丽莎白时代英语散文中的使用。所研究的分词类型是一种被称为“自由辅助词”或“联系辅助词”的分词。被调查的作品有：托马斯·德洛尼的《纽贝里湖》、托马斯·纳什的《不幸的旅行者》和约翰·赖利的《Euphues》。其次，本研究试图表明，使用光学字符阅读器可以轻松准确地生成语料库，因为尽管今天越来越多的电子文本可以访问，使用计算机化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数据库。出现这种情况的部分原因是，现有的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，通过这种方法，初学者可以用个人电脑轻松地将语料库处理成数据库，从中检索各种对他的研究有很大用处的项目。为此目的，一些程序是用Mil编写的，Mil是Mifes的一种编程语言（Megasoft，大阪）。从三位作者的散文中建立的数据库已经搜索了与句子长度和语料库中用作自由附加词的分词的出现有关的数据，结果表明所审查的两个项目之间可能存在关联。

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.