Building a Representative Theater Corpus A Broader View of Nineteent
“With this exciting book, Angus Grieve-Smith provides answers to a long-standing issue in the study of languages: how can linguists provide the most full-fledged picture of how language was used in past centuries? Indeed, his historical syntax study of th
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Angus Grieve-Smith
Building a Representative Theater Corpus
Angus Grieve-Smith
Building a Representative Theater Corpus A Broader View of Nineteenth-Century French
Angus Grieve-Smith The New School New York, NY, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-32401-8 ISBN 978-3-030-32402-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32402-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Charles Beaumont Wicks and all the other tool-builders.
Preface
The Goal of This Book Usage-based linguistics has produced a number of striking results over the years. But all these results are derived from corpora that are not representative of most speech, or even consistently representative of a single genre balance over time. Could these results be illusory? What if the patterns we have found are only artifacts of these unrepresentative corpora? If we can find the same patterns in consistent, representative corpora, it will put these theories on firmer ground. To do this for my work on syntactic changes in French, I have created the first part of the Digital Parisian Stage corpus, a new, representative, consistent corpus of theatrical texts. Earlier studies showed that in the nineteenth century there was quite a bit of variation in the expression of negation and the use of dislocation, as a result of ongoing changes in these systems. When we compare these features in the Digital Parisian Stage with an older corpus like FRANTEXT, we find that the newer forms are more frequent in the Digital Parisian Stage, while the plays in FRANTEXT favor more conservative forms. These differences highlight
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