A Computer-assisted Study of Participles in Early Modern English

本研究的目的是多方面的；首先，研究了伊丽莎白时期英语散文中分词的使用。它处理的分词类型被称为“自由辅助词”或“Nexus Tertiary”。被调查的作品有：托马斯·德洛尼的《纽贝里湖》，托马斯·纳什的《幸运的旅行者》，约翰·赖利的《Euphues》，《剖析怀特》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准确地生成语料库，因为尽管今天可以访问越来越多的电子文本，使用计算机化数据库的英语语言学家有时可能会感到有必要创建自己的语料库。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，从中检索到各种对他的研究有很大用处的项目。为此目的，许多程序都是用Mil编写的，Mil是Mifes（大阪Megasoft）的一种编程语言。从这四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。从语篇分析的角度对句首分词的逻辑主语进行了研究，发现逻辑主语通常出现在前一句的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.