Particles in literary and non-literary corpora

Traditional grammars primarily describe those phenomena that are traditionally described in grammars. For some elements, such as particles and other spoken language phenomena, there is hardly any dedicated space in those types of grammars, and even many theoretical grammars do not always manage to address them. However, they are interesting. Together with Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens ING), we will research whether we can use particles and other function words to answer the question: What is literature? There is anecdotal evidence that translations from English contain fewer modal particles than comparable original Dutch texts. We are going to test that in a corpus of original and translated literature using quantitative methods. We will then examine how this works with translations from German and French and whether various levels of literature correspond with a difference in particle use. We will also examine whether distributional semantics can be functional in learning more about the meaning of particles.

Researchers: Ton van der Wouden, Folgert Karsdorp