A Computer-assisted Study of Participles in Early Modern English

本研究的目的是多方面的：首先，它旨在调查分词在莎士比亚时期的英语散文中的使用。研究的分词类型是一种称为“自由附加语”或“第三连结”的分词。调查的工程包括：托马斯德洛尼的《纽伯里的亚克》、托马斯纳什的《新的旅行者》和约翰·利利的《尤弗斯》。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制作语料库，因为尽管今天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会感到有必要创建自己的语料库。第三，本研究试图建立一种方法，通过这种方法，一个新手与个人计算机可以很容易地处理语料库到一个数据库，他可以从其中检索各种项目的巨大效用，他的研究。为此目的，用Mifes（Megasoft，Osaka）的一种编程语言"Mil“编写了一些程序，从三位作者的散文中建立的数据库中搜索了与句子长度和语料库中用作自由分词的分词的出现有关的数据，结果表明所检查的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.