(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
sentence to contain a relative clause is given support by the presence of which near the
top of our list of keywords.
Nevertheless, there are certain limitations of these techniques to bear in mind when
deciding whether or how to use them in one’s research. First, the techniques described
here are restricted to analysis at the lexical level. Matters of syntax, a detailed
consideration of which would require that all the texts be tagged, and automatic,
non-intuitive semantic analysis cannot be dealt with 5 . Also, scrutiny of a more abstract
nature involving comparisons at the discourse level of each Spectator essay, such as
Knight’s observation that many of the essays flow from specificity to generality or
generality to specificity (Knight 1993: 45), would be pretty well impossible to perform.
Secondly, the use of corpus techniques does not mean the researcher can get away with
not having at least some pre-awareness of the content of the texts being analyzed. For
instance, if we had included all of the Spectator essays that incorporated (real or
contrived) correspondence from readers, the results for Steele would have been very
different. The list of keywords would have included Spectator, Mr (letters were
addressed to ‘Mr. Spectator’), servant and humble (‘Your humble Servant’) 6 . The
existence of spelling variants in eighteenth-century English (e.g. ‘your self’, ‘yourself’)
also had to be kept in mind when interpreting results.
Regarding procedure, if one adopts the techniques described in this paper, it is
important to remember to use concordances to check context before assigning keywords
or clusters to semantic categories. This allowed us to correctly allot condition to the
‘Life in Society’ semantic group as it was mostly used with the now-obsolete sense
‘social rank’. A look at the concordance lines also stopped us from assigning a temporal
meaning to the cluster at the same time.
Finally, and on a more practical note, it is worth pointing out that the availability of a
text or set of texts may make a corpus analysis more or less feasible. The current study
used texts downloaded from the Project Gutenberg website, and with a minimum of
5 While Wmatrix (see Rayson 2008) does offer syntactic and semantic analysis, the
eighteenth-century English of my texts, with their variant spellings and earlier meanings, made its
use unfeasible.
6 On the other hand, I was aware that Addison’s essays contained many Latin and English
quotations, and no attempt was made to remove them. This seemed not to affect the results, probably
because of the comparatively large size of his subcorpus.
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