A Quantitative Analysis on a Literary Genre Essay’s Syntactic Features
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Yaqin Wang
Abstract
Depicted as a puzzling literary genre, essay, in relation to novel, is always given enough attention in literary studies. The present study intends to investigate characteristics of essay through a quantitative analysis of its dependency relations. A detailed investigation was carried out on the relationship, on the one hand, between essay and different types of fictions and, on the other hand, among contemporaneous essayists. Corpora used in this study were composed of four literary genres extracted from LOB Corpus as well as an essay genre constructed by essays of four British essayists. Results show that 1) regarding probability distributions of dependency distances, essay shares similarities with fictions; 2) dependency direction is a useful measurement in language typology rather than in genre judgement; 3) the distribution of dependency type nsubj may be a useful metric for distinguishing essay from fictions, whereas, essayists seem to share commonalities within this genre.
Abstract
Depicted as a puzzling literary genre, essay, in relation to novel, is always given enough attention in literary studies. The present study intends to investigate characteristics of essay through a quantitative analysis of its dependency relations. A detailed investigation was carried out on the relationship, on the one hand, between essay and different types of fictions and, on the other hand, among contemporaneous essayists. Corpora used in this study were composed of four literary genres extracted from LOB Corpus as well as an essay genre constructed by essays of four British essayists. Results show that 1) regarding probability distributions of dependency distances, essay shares similarities with fictions; 2) dependency direction is a useful measurement in language typology rather than in genre judgement; 3) the distribution of dependency type nsubj may be a useful metric for distinguishing essay from fictions, whereas, essayists seem to share commonalities within this genre.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Preface V
- Contents XI
- Dependency, Corpora and Cognition 1
- Interrelations among Dependency Tree Widths, Heights and Sentence Lengths 31
- Quantitative Analysis of Syntactic Dependency in Czech 53
- Dissortativity in a Bipartite Network of Dependency Relations and Communicative Functions 71
- Empirical Analyses of Valency Structures 93
- Regular Dynamic Patterns of Verbal Valency Ellipsis in Modern Spoken Chinese 101
- Negentropy of Dependency Types and Parts of Speech in the Clause 119
- Dynamic Valency and Dependency Distance 145
- Minimization and Probability Distribution of Dependency Distance in the Process of Second Language Acquisition 167
- Influences of Dependency Distance on the Syntactic Development of Deaf and Hard-ofhearing Students 191
- Positional Aspects of Dependency Distance 213
- Dependency Distance and Direction of English Relative Clauses 239
- Differences between English Subject Postmodifiers and Object Post-modifiers: From the Perspective of Dependency Distance 261
- How Do Universal Dependencies Distinguish Language Groups? 277
- A Quantitative Analysis on a Literary Genre Essay’s Syntactic Features 295
- A Multidimensional Model of Syntactic Dependency Trees for Authorship Attribution 315
- Subject Index 349
- Author Index 357
- List of Contributors 365
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Preface V
- Contents XI
- Dependency, Corpora and Cognition 1
- Interrelations among Dependency Tree Widths, Heights and Sentence Lengths 31
- Quantitative Analysis of Syntactic Dependency in Czech 53
- Dissortativity in a Bipartite Network of Dependency Relations and Communicative Functions 71
- Empirical Analyses of Valency Structures 93
- Regular Dynamic Patterns of Verbal Valency Ellipsis in Modern Spoken Chinese 101
- Negentropy of Dependency Types and Parts of Speech in the Clause 119
- Dynamic Valency and Dependency Distance 145
- Minimization and Probability Distribution of Dependency Distance in the Process of Second Language Acquisition 167
- Influences of Dependency Distance on the Syntactic Development of Deaf and Hard-ofhearing Students 191
- Positional Aspects of Dependency Distance 213
- Dependency Distance and Direction of English Relative Clauses 239
- Differences between English Subject Postmodifiers and Object Post-modifiers: From the Perspective of Dependency Distance 261
- How Do Universal Dependencies Distinguish Language Groups? 277
- A Quantitative Analysis on a Literary Genre Essay’s Syntactic Features 295
- A Multidimensional Model of Syntactic Dependency Trees for Authorship Attribution 315
- Subject Index 349
- Author Index 357
- List of Contributors 365
