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Building a Representative Theater Corpus pp 1–5Cite as

Introduction

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Abstract

The Digital Parisian Stage project has begun with a random sample of theatrical texts from 1800 to 1815. It is intended as a consistent, representative sample of the theatrical genre for studying language change and an improvement over unrepresentative corpora like FRANTEXT, with results that can be generalized to all of Parisian theater and possibly beyond. To determine how different the Digital Parisian Stage is from FRANTEXT, Grieve-Smith compared the theatrical texts in both corpora from 1800 to 1815 on two frequency measures: declarative sentence negation and left/right dislocation. He found significant differences between the two corpora in all measures. This suggests that the results many linguists have gotten from FRANTEXT may not be accurate, and that the Digital Parisian Stage will be valuable for revising those results.

Keywords

  • Corpus; Representative sample; French; Theater; Negation; Left dislocation; Right dislocation

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The New School, New York, NY, USA

    Angus Grieve-Smith

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  1. Angus Grieve-Smith
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Correspondence to Angus Grieve-Smith .

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Grieve-Smith, A. (2019). Introduction. In: Building a Representative Theater Corpus. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32402-5_1

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