(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
we had not consulted the concordance and merely assumed its ‘literary’ use.
Another semantic field with several members is the category which contains words
relating to religion. These are characters or entities in the Bible (Adam, Eve, Satan,
angels), words which allude to the afterlife (paradise, infernal), and other
religiously-tinged items (creation, soul). Rather than pointing to the prevalence in
Addison’s essays of religious themes, it is an indication of his need to discuss such
themes when touching on Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Adam, Eve, Satan and the
angels are important protagonists.
The most important thing to note with regard to the group of personal pronouns and
possessives is the relatively significant use of first person plurals in Addison’s essays
(we, us, our), particularly if we compare this with Steele’s use of pronouns (see below).
While use of first person pronouns would be unremarkable, the use of the plural forms
perhaps indicates Addison’s desire to include the reader directly in his essays, to draw
the reader into his opinions and become almost a collaborator.
Along with personal pronouns, the group of prepositions is of a more functional nature
than most of the other patterns. Additionally, in is ranked sixth highest on the list of
keywords. An examination of the concordance lines for in revealed that most examples
occurred with full noun phrases following, and most uses were for discourse purposes,
often to add cohesion to the text, rather than as prototypical spatial expressions. For
example, the most common collocate at R3 (three places after in) was place, primarily
because of Addison’s tendency to structure his arguments with the enumerative
adverbial phrases ‘in the next/last/first/second (etc.) place’. Also common at R3 was
manner in the phrases ‘in such a manner’, ‘in the same manner’. The use of book at R3
in examples such as ‘in the First/Second (etc.) Book’ and paper at R2 as ‘in this Paper’
reflect common stylistic strategies that Addison used to orient the reader to various parts
of his and others’ texts.
The appearance of personal pronouns/possessives and prepositions on our list shows
that a keyword analysis may reveal more than just the ‘aboutness’ of a collection of
texts; it may also reveal how the writer deals with those topics. This is confirmed by the
other patterns that were identified. While the presence of the content words ideas and
imagination point to his concern with the mental realm, the words kind, nature, kinds,
species and particular all hint that one of Addison’s major preoccupations is the
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