Dear Martin,

At 12:38 PM 4/11/2006, you wrote:
>My crude mind was  after much simpler things in my original
>question.

Ah....

>   There is a large number of pre-twentieth century novels
>where the distinction between speech and narrative is pretty obvious.
>There is an indeterminate subset of these novels--but probably not a
>trivial number--where this distinction can be inferred fairly
>accurately from typographical layout (though the scripts to extract
>the distinctions would have to be adjusted from author to author or
>publisher to publisher).
>
>You can then retroactively tag speech in those novels, and this would
>give you a 'spoken' corpus as opposed to a 'narrative' corpus. Is
>that of likely interest to anybody, and is there any reason to
>believe that the corpus resulting from these various constraints
>would be 'good enough' for some or many inquiries?

Hm, I guess it would depend on the inquiries.

The first thing I'd find to be of interest would be which works would 
fall into this set, and which works would not. And how "fuzzy" the 
set would be. How would one detect whether a work was in the set? 
What makes the distinction between speech and narrative consistent 
and obvious? Presumably the presence of some markers (say, for 
dialogue) and the absence of others (say, for indirect discourse). 
Even then, one would have to be on the watch for false hits. Some 
kinds of narrative might have conventional markers for dialog, and 
yet pose similar problems for narrative subjectivity as those that 
did not. (I'm thinking of Charlotte Bronte's works, or George 
Eliot's, as possible boundary cases.)

Ease of auto-tagging (which is to say, level of consistency and 
explicitness of "tagging" by layout, typography, and narrative 
convention) might be an interesting marker of some sort of genre ... 
or it might not. It would be particularly interesting to see where 
such works would cluster. But this is meta-analysis, and has nothing 
to do with what you could learn, or not, from such tagging once you had it.

As to the latter, I think this would depend on the genre(s) of works, 
their commonalities (or not) over and above this property of 
consistency, and what kinds of inquiries you might pose relative to 
these properties.

>My hunch is that there isn't much interest in this--which is itself a
>useful thing to know

But there's a difference between the level of interest going in, and 
the potential for discoveries that could be interesting. :-)

Best regards,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:[log in to unmask]
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