Williamson, Jeanine Mary. The Vocabulary and Rhetorical Structures in
Literary Studies Articles about Molly Bloom: A Description, and Applications for
Information Science. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000. 349p. Advisor: Paul Solomon.
The purpose of this research was to intensively study 11 literary studies articles
about the fictional character from James Joyce's Ulysses , Molly
Bloom. A typology was qualitatively developed for coding word types, and
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Maim & Thompson, 1987) was used to code
sentence roles, or functions, such as background, evidence,
thesis, etc. A few sentence roles in addition to those found in RST were
used. A goal of the study was to develop rules for selecting sentences from the
articles to represent them. A number of analyses were done to further this
goal: the distributions of word types and sentence role types within the various
articles were counted; the occurrences of word types within sentences of
particular roles were found; the bigrams (two-word type pairs) within sentences of
different sentence roles were counted. In addition, the number of times sentence
role types followed other sentence roles was counted, and the agreement
(percentage of word types shared) between sentence roles that followed other
sentence roles was calculated. Z-scores (Smajda, 1993) were used to determine when
bigrams and followed-by pairs were comparatively frequent. A study of the
occurrence of actual “phrases” (real combinations of word-types, as
opposed to simple co-occurrence pairs, or bigrams) was done. Chi-square goodness
of fit tests revealed that in some cases the distributions of actually occurring
word combinations across sentence roles differed from the overall distributions of
sentence roles. The quantitative results and qualitative observations were used to
generate sentence extraction rules. The qualitatively derived rule for
macroparadigmatic articles (those which apply a theory to a literary work or
discuss it in comparison with another work) (Fahnestock and Secor, 1991) worked
better than the quantitatively derived rules, in many cases yielding coherent, not
overly concrete extracts that captured main points of the articles. The
macroparadigmatic rule and another less satisfactory one for concrete articles
were applied to 21 additional articles.
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