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Notes
The following editions were used in the project: Edward Albee,Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? College ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1975); Samuel Beckett,Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954); T.S. Eliot,The Cocktail Party (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950); Simon Gray,Butley (New York: Viking Press, 1971); Lorraine Hansberry,A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Random House, 1968); Lillian Hellman,The Children's Hour, inFour Plays (New York: Random House, 1942); Arthur Miller,Death of a Salesman (New York: Viking Press, 1949); Sean O'Casey,Juno and the Paycock, inThree Plays (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966); Eugene O'Neill,Long Day's Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956); John Osborne,Look Back in Anger (New York: Criterion, 1957); Harold Pinter,The Homecoming (New York: Grove Press, 1965); David Rabe,The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones (New York: Viking Press, 1973); Elmer Rice,Street Scene (New York: Samuel French, 1928); William Saroyan,The Time of Your Life, inThree Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939); Bernard Shaw,Major Barbara, inCollected Plays with their Prefaces, 3 (London: The Bodley Head, 1971); Bernard Shaw,Mrs. Warren's Profession, inCollected Plays with their Prefaces, 1 (London: The Bodley Head, 1971); Tom Stoppard,Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1967); John Millington Synge,The Playboy of the Western World, inThe Complete Works of John M. Synge (New York: Random House, 1934); Arnold Wesker,Chicken Soup with Barley, inThe Wesker Trilogy (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1959); Tennessee Williams,A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1947); Oscar Wilde,The Importance of Being Earnest, inFive Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1961).
Mary Hiatt,The Way Women Write (New York: Teachers College Press, 1977), p. 91. Hiatt in her computer study of feminine versus masculine style also counts ‘ly’ adverbs only on the somewhat different ground that they are “the ones chiefly involved in hyperbolic use.” My decision to limit the count to marked adverbs, like Hiatt's, proceeds from the general recognition that the heavy use of ‘ly’ adverbs constitutes a feature of style. A stopword list was, of course, used to avoid words like ‘rely.’
See for example Martin Joos,The Five Clocks (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), Chapter 3, “The Informal Clocks,” especially pp. 23–25.
Words like ‘illustrious,’ ‘notorious,’ and ‘union’ were, of course, eliminated from the scans through a stopword list and a match-up process.
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Potter, R.G. Toward a syntactic differentiation of period style in modern drama: Significant between-play variability in 21 english-language plays. Comput Hum 14, 187–196 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02403767
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02403767