句子长度序列的序结构网络分析

Ordinal Structure Network Analysis of Sentence Length Series

摘要: 小说的叙事语言和结构，是读者群、传播媒介、作者的语言偏好和对事物的理解、以及作者和读者所处社会现实环境等共同作用的结果，因而也是挖掘有关作者、读者、以及其所处社会环境的资料源。文章从小说文本提取出句子，得到句子长度序列，采用序结构分析方法考察语句长短变化特点，以得到关于作者的叙事语言特征和可能的情绪变化。对中文小说《红楼梦》和英文版小说“Remembrance of Things Past”(《追忆似水年华》)的计算发现，不同作者写作风格具有各自的特异性，同一作者写作风格则保持一致；《红楼梦》前80回和后40回的序结构转移网络主要结构相近，表明后部分的作者有意模仿前部分作者的叙述方式，但在其它转移细节上表现出明显差异；英文版《追忆似水流年》的语言叙述变化更丰富一些。文章提出的方法可以用于作者语言风格及环境对其影响的讨论。

Abstract: The description characteristics and structure for a novel are a result of a balance between the specified readers, the media, the writer’s preference in language and understanding of the described events, and the social circumstance, etc. A novel is subsequently a rich reservoir from which one can discover the relevant facts about the writer, the readers, the media, and their social environment. In this work, from a text-formatted novel, we extract all the sentences, the lengths of which form a time series named sentence length series. The ordinal graph is then adopted to display the evolving behavior of the sentence length, from which we hope to find evidence for the writer’s preference in description and mood fluctuation. Detailed calculations are conducted on the classical Chinese novel entitled “A Dream of Red Mansions” and the English version of the famous novel entitled “Remembrance of Things Past”. Interesting findings include: 1) Each writer has a specific and stable description style, while the same author maintains a consistent style; 2) The former 80 chapters and the later 40 ones in “A Dream of Red Mansions” share the main structure of the ordinal graph transition network, indicating that the author of the latter part intentionally imitated the narrative style of the author of the first part, but shows significant differences in other connection details; 3) Wider variety can be found in the description in the English version of “Remembrance of Things Past”. The proposed method can be extended to investigate the writer’s language style and the social circumstance.