David Herman: Quantitative Methods in Narratology: A Corpus-Based Study of Motion Events in Stories

Table 7 lists, by text-type, all occurrences of the motion verbs considered for the present study. In all, lemmas for 132 different verbs of motion were tabulated in a corpus consisting of 211,649 words of narrative text. (See section 3.2.2 of the chapter for a description of the criteria used to select the verbs listed in Table 7.) As indicated previously, eight different narrative text-types were included in the corpus: North Carolina Ghost Stories; Oral Holocaust Testimonies; 19th-Century Realistic Fiction; 19th-Century Psychological Fiction; 20th-Century Realistic Fiction; 20th-Century Psychological Fiction; 19th-Century Nonfiction; 20th-Century Nonfiction.

The following is a further breakdown of the narratives included in each text-type. Examples of each category were chosen, in part, on the basis of their availability on the World Wide Web.i Narratives accessible online were more readily converted to the.txt or text-only format required as input for the CONC 1.76 concordance generator.

• Ghost stories exemplified by tales of the supernatural collected during the 1990s in Graham County, in Robeson County, and on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, by researchers associated with the North Carolina Language and Life Project, which is based at North Carolina State University (see http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics) (reports of research on this sub-corpus of ghost stories can also be found in Herman 2001, 2003a, 2003b).

• Oral Holocaust testimony exemplified by three oral testimonials retrieved from the Voices of the Holocaust website (<http://voices.iit.edu/>).

• 19th-Century Realistic Fiction exemplified by George Eliot’s Middlemarch, retrieved from the Electronic Text Center based at the University of Virginia (<http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/mission.html>).

• 19th-Century Psychological Fiction exemplified by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” retrieved from the Electronic Text Center based at the University of Virginia.

• 20th-Century Realistic Fiction exemplified by James Joyce’s “The Dead” (<http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/29/63/frameset.html>).ii

• 20th-Century Psychological Fiction exemplified by Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” (<http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/jolycrnr.htm>)

• 19th-Century Nonfiction exemplified by the slave narrative written by Henry Bibb and retrieved from the Electronic Text Center based at the University of Virginia

• 20th-Century Nonfiction exemplified by the memoir of Marcel Braitstein (<http://migs.concordia.ca/memoirs/braitstein/braitstein.html>)

The CONC 1.76 Concordance generator can be downloaded as freeware for Macintosh computers from the website maintained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (<http://www.sil.org/computing/conc/>; this page contains links to the CONC tutorial and CONC manual). Also available from the Summer Institute of Linguistics is MonoConc, a different concordancing tool for Windows as well as Macintosh platforms, as well part of speech (POS) taggers. For information about other concordance-generating programs that can be used for corpus-based research, see Hockey (2001).

Table 7. All Verbs of Motion in the Corpus