(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

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files were converted and hyperlinks to footnotes were deleted. Also removed were the
footnotes themselves and the 1891 introduction to the edition. As WordSmith ignores
anything in square brackets when compiling wordlists and concordances, I decided to
bracket the annotations containing number, date and author at the top of each essay, to
bracket each initial Latin or Greek motto, and to do the same with the initials (‘L.’, ‘T.’
etc.) that appeared at the bottom of each number of the periodical.
More drastically I also made the decision to remove all numbers of the periodical that
contain ‘letters to the editor’. It is not always clear whether these are genuinely from
readers of the periodical or fabricated by the contributors themselves. As the focus of
this research was to examine stylistically the contributions to The Spectator of Addison
and Steele, and as retaining the letters may have skewed the data, all numbers that
incorporated correspondence, whether by Addison or Steele, were removed. Since
Steele in particular favored the incorporation of letters in his essays, this decision led to
a considerable reduction in the amount of data to be examined. Of the 555 editions of
The Spectator that appeared in 1711-12, only 296, or 53.3% of the total, were analyzed
in this study. The composition of the three Spectator subcorpora, Addison.txt, Steele.txt
and Others.txt, can be seen in Table 1:
Corpus Content Size
Addison.txt 192 contributions About 268,000 tokens
Steele.txt 81 contributions About 107,000 tokens
Others.txt 23 contributions from
others (Budgell 15, Hughes
6, Pope 1, Parnell 1)
Table 1: Composition of the three Spectator subcorpora
3. Keywords
About 32,000 tokens
The notion of keyword is now a familiar one to most researchers in corpus linguistics. A
keyword is a word that appears in a particular corpus a statistically significant number
of times more often than in another (usually larger) ‘reference corpus’. Keywords,
therefore, are lexical items that are prominent or foregrounded in Text A when
contrasted with their use or non-use in Text B. The semantic content of keywords is
seen as a good indicator of the foregrounded content of a text, in particular reflecting
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