#leterature

[wronghands1]

[veganlittlething]

Improving our understanding of Dickens using corpus linguistics

Corpora. This is usually large collections of digital texts that we look at to find out how natural language works. The corpus linguistics study of language has come about with advances in computing. Computers can't really read text for us, but they can help to count words, search texts, visualise, and display what we find in electronic texts. Computer-assisted study of language has made quite an important contribution to our understanding of how the language and texts work. Because very often, we are just not aware of the subtle patterns that create meaning in texts. So if I asked you, what do you think are the most frequent nouns that are used in the English language, you probably wouldn't come up with things like "world," or "time," or "day," "way," or "thing." But these words are frequent because they occur in particular phrases. So the noun "world," for instance, is used when you talk about the richest man in the world, or the best restaurant in the world. Or we also talk about things like every time, the same time. We speak about spending the day, or we even talk about our five a day. All these are examples that make these nouns very, very frequent in the language. As our world is becoming more and more digital, there's a range of texts that we can analyse as corpus linguists. And the texts that I'm particularly interested in are literary texts. So I like studying narrative fiction. And now, you might ask, if texts like the novels by Charles Dickens, or the novels by Jane Austen, have be analysed by generations of literary critics, what could a computer help us find that is still interesting to look at? The thing here is that computers are very good at actually comparing patterns across different sets of texts. So while a lot has been said about Dickensian characters or the way that Dickens writes in a particular kind of fashion, not too much has been said about how Dickens is very similar to other writers. Not much has been said about the patterns that are just general patterns in literary texts, so they are not very specific, but they're just there to create fictional worlds. One of the areas of my research is the study of techniques that are used to create fictional characters. I'm interested in linguistic patterns that authors use to create fictional people. So when you read a novel, you usually remember things that fictional characters say because they're so specific, striking, or characterising.

So if you think about Oliver Twist, you might remember this phrase, "Please, sir. Can I have some more?" Or when you've read Bleak House, you might have noticed that Mr. Snagsby in Bleak House says, "not to put too fine a point upon it" quite a number of times. Or people who haven't even read A Christmas Carol might associate Scrooge with the phrase, "bah humbug." These are all interesting phrases to think about literary characters. It is, however, also really rather interesting to find out what is the same about fictional people. How are fictional people very similar if you look across different literary texts? And obviously, one feature to study fictional people is what they say, so fictional speech.

If you now use corpus linguistic methods, you can look across a number of novels. And then you can analyse things that we call clusters, or repeated sequences of words. What you then find might be phrases like, "what do you think of," "what are you going to," or patterns that start with "I don't know." And these are phrases that aren't just what fictional characters say, but they're very frequent in spoken language in general.

The question to what extent fictional speech is like or is not like spoken language is quite an interesting one. Fictional speech simply cannot be the same as transcribed spoken language because a novel, after all, is written text. So there are characters that speak in the novel. But there's also a narrator that produces narration around the fictional speech. Together, with colleagues here at the University of Birmingham and colleagues at the University of Nottingham, we have developed a web application that helps us study patterns in fictional texts. This web application that we call Click makes it possible for us to focus on fictional speech and compare this with narration. And that is possible because we have marked up text within quotation marks and text outside of quotation marks. So if you look at this example here, you will see anything that is red is text within quotation marks, and anything that is black is just text outside of quotation marks. Particularly interesting places in narration are those where the narrator interrupts the speech of characters. Such examples are called suspensions. So in our example here, "returned Mrs. Chick, a little softened," is what we call a suspension because for a moment, the speech of the character is suspended. Here's another example, where the suspension contains body language that accompanies the speech of the character. So here we've got Mr. Tulkinghorn, who is "loitering a little forward with his hands behind him." The presentation of body language is a rather crucial part of patterns of characterization because body language tends to happen at the same time as speech. Texts, however, are linear so it is rather complicated to represent that things are happening simultaneously, at the same time. With the suspensions, it is possible to create this impression of speech and body language happening at the same time.

A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There was a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries, it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things, in general, were settled forever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this.Mrs.Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But thatWoodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place inthe capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; thehighwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow- tradesman whom he stopped in his character of "theCaptain," gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself bythe other four, "in consequence of the failure of his ammunition:" after which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols foughtbattles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses fromthe necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St.Giles's, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and themusketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures--the creatures of this chronicle among the rest--along with the roads that lay before them.

@MichaelaMahlberg director of the Centre for Corpus Research at the University of Birmingham

[vivendotrasogni]

[enveredei]

O Silêncio é o que tememos. Há um Resgate na Voz – Mas Silêncio é In nidade. Não tem sequer uma Face. Emily Dickinson

[zlepie]

She was the sun

And I was patiently

waiting for her

to rise

[therealdigitalhero]

Coming soon:

The Real Digital Hero. The story of one man, in a world without barriers, the digital world!

[rosesarepinkforever]

Thoughts

We all think we know it all But when it comes to something small We jump to conclusions and doubts When nothing really works out We need a break to clean our minds But when the time comes we're all blind We can't see the good or bad We start to think that we're "rad" But when in the end of the day we see what we accomplished and what we said- Will you regret or think again or would you do the same?

[ideiatransitiva]

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Dessa vez vamos falar de "O Rei de Amarelo". Esperamos que todos gostem. Aproveitem pra ver nossas outras resenhas: youtube.com/ideiatransitiva