A Quantitative Analysis on a Literary Genre Essay’s Syntactic Features
Yaqin Wang, Jianwei Yan · 2018
Depicted as a puzzling literary genre, essay, in relation to novel, is always given enough attention in literary studies. The present study intends to investigate characteristics of essay through a quantitative analysis of its dependency relations. A detailed investigation was carried out on the relationship, on the one hand, between essay and different types of fictions and, on the other hand, among contemporaneous essayists. Corpora used in this study were composed of four literary genres extracted from LOB Corpus as well as an essay genre constructed by essays of four British essayists. Results show that 1) regarding probability distributions of dependency distances, essay shares similarities with fictions; 2) dependency direction is a useful measurement in language typology rather than in genre judgement; 3) the distribution of dependency type nsubj may be a useful metric for distinguishing essay from fictions, whereas, essayists seem to share commonalities within this genre.