Quotation and Narration in Contemporary Popular Fiction in Swedish : Stylometric Explorations

• A fundamental feature of many genres of fiction is the alternation between a narrative frame (NF) andquoted inset (QI) dialogue. Both formal and representational features distinguish NF and QI segments. This paper is an explorative study on the stylistic differentiation between frame and inset material in recent commercially successful fiction in Swedish. There are mainly two orthographic options as regards this distinction: Explicitly enclosing inset segments within quotation marks is one. Using an initial dash to indicate utterance display is another, in which case frame and inset material typically alternate in away not made explicit by the orthography. The corpus behind the present study comprised 450 novels. In order to deal with dash orthography data (135 books), we trained a multilayer perceptron classifier to tell NF and QI segments apart. We relied on the fact that native quotation mark text can be converted to annotated dash orthography data, which can then be used for supervised training and validation. A small-scale manual evaluation on the texts we aim to analyze, yielded an accuracy score around 95%. In order to explore the stylometric relations between NF and QI components in the novels, we looked at a selection of basic grammatical features. A characterization of each feature was made by means of recording the fraction of works in which the relative frequency of the feature is higher in QI than in NF. This summarizes how authors tend to “use” that feature to create a contrast between NF and QI. Another way to examine how the NF and QI styles are related is to apply a correlation test. We thensaw, for instance, that QI material in 100% of the books are denser in auxiliary verbs, second person pronouns, and interjections, while NF segments in all or almost all cases are denser in nouns, adjectives, third person pronouns, and prepositions. We could also observe that e.g. noun density in NF and QI correlate in a strong way. The same holds for adverbs and cardinal numerals. This suggests that books and authors exhibit stylistic tendencies which affect both narrator and the characters, as far as the kindof fiction we have studied go.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Språkteknologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Language Technology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

fiction

dialogue

quotation

quoted inset

narration

narratorial frame

direct speech

stylometry

Datorlingvistik

Computational Linguistics

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)