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The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
classification of whatever it is he is discussing. He is also concerned with evaluations,
particularly positive evaluations (beautiful, finely, beauties), grading what he is talking
about (first, principal), and drawing comparisons (likewise, same).
Even what are at first blush unpromising functional keywords may tell us something
about a writer’s style, although we need to be careful how we interpret our results.
Which ranks second in the Addison keyword list. If we look at part of the concordance
for this item, we see that in most of its uses which introduces a relative clause.
ith Love And sweet Compliance, which declare unfeign'd Union
ct of the Poem. His Discourse, which follows the gentle Rebu
great Merit. The Thought with which he comforts the afflict
haracter, whatever the Fate is which they undergo. There is
Virtue, and losing the Fame of which he was possessed. Death
eems apprehensive of the Evils which might befall the Specie
y to the sum of earthly Bliss, Which I enjoy; and must confe
inst it by timely Admonitions; which very artfully prepare t
brings about that fatal Event which is the Subject of the P
xt Book, where the Weakness of which Adam here gives such di
Figure 1: Concordance for which (first ten lines)
In fact, it has been remarked that a typical Addisonian sentence consists of a main
clause followed by a relative (Lannering 1951, quoted in McIntosh 1998: 94), and here
is concrete lexical evidence for that assertion.
The keyness of the determiners the and those warrants a word of caution when looking
for an explanation, and reminds us that the interpretation of our results depends very
much on the contents of the reference corpus which we are using as our standard of
comparison. Biber et al. (1999: 267-268) point out that the increases in frequency in
comparison as we move from less formal spoken contexts to more formal written
contexts such as academic prose. According to the table that Biber et al. provide in their
grammar, in conversation the frequency of the is just under 20,000 per million words,
whereas in academic writing it climbs to about 55,000. The frequency for the use of the
in the Addison corpus is around 60,000, perhaps indicating a formal style. Of course,
standard frequencies for the twentieth century and those for eighteenth century prose
may be different, so any absolute indication of level of formality is impossible to draw.
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