(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
There are eight words that have to do with people: six words that refer to males, namely
man, gentleman, men, fellow, prince, officer, and three that refer to groups of people –
people, crowds, men (this last belonging to both groups). The composition of this
semantic field points to the fact that Steele’s essays tend to be mainly male-oriented,
that he usually discusses those in the upper ranks of society, and that he is not averse to
making generalizations about people.
A look at the concordance for man draws two of these observations together. The most
common collocate at L1 for man is a (212 times), a reflection of how often Steele tends
to make generalizing statements. However, the occurrence of of as the main R1
collocate shows how he often refines this generalizing propensity, with a man of (60
times) and the man of (10 times) collocating with such personal qualities as honour (6),
sense (6) and pleasure (3), and, most common of all, wit (9) (in fact, the six-word
cluster a man of wit and pleasure appears a total of six times in his subcorpus).
The group of personal pronouns and possessives on Steele’s list of keywords contrasts
strongly with the corresponding group on Addison’s list. For the latter we noted a
greater tendency to use first-person plural pronouns and possessives. Steele, on the
other hand, shows a predominance of third-person singular (he, she, her) and
second-person forms (you, your) 3 . The salience of you is underlined by its position at
the top of the list of keywords. A random twenty-line sample from the concordance for
you showed the following usage pattern: twelve instances of non-referential, ‘general’
you, four instances where a character addresses Steele as ‘you’ in a story that Steele is
relating, three instances where one character addresses another character as ‘you’ in one
of Steele’s stories, and one instance which is ambiguous between non-referential use
and character-to-Steele use. If this small sample accurately reflects Steele’s use of you
in his essays, then it seems to be another indication of his generalizing tendency and his
use of anecdotes, and not a signal of his directly addressing the reader.
Of the other patterns in the keyword data, it can be noted that as in the case of Addison
there is an evaluative group, this time consisting of good, agreeable and honest. There
is also a somewhat larger group of words referring to mental processes and objects, two
3 ‘Yourself’ was written as one or two words in the eighteenth century. In the Steele subcorpus
‘your self’ appears twenty times and ‘yourself’ seven times. Making similar adjustments for
Addison’s corpus data I calculated that if all instances of this reflexive pronoun had been
standardised to ‘yourself’, ‘your’ would still have been a keyword, but would have dropped from
seventh to thirteenth place on the list.
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