Abstract
This paper suggests ways in which the pattern-matching capability of the computer can be used to further our understanding of stylized ballad language. The study is based upon a computer-aided analysis of the entire 595,000- word corpus of Francis James Child'sThe English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1892), a collection of 305 textual traditions, most of which are represented by a variety of texts. The paper focuses on the “Mary Hamilton” tradition as a means of discussing the function of phatic language in the ballad genre and the significance of textual variation.
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Cathy Lynn Preston is a Research Associate, Computer Research in the Humanities, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is interested in folklore, particularly oral narrative; popular literature of the 18th- and 19th-century, particularly broadside and chapbook; the works of John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Hardy; Middle English romance and lyric. Her major publications areA KWIC Concordance to Jonathan Swift's “A Tale of a Tub,” “The Battle of the Books,” and “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, A Fragment, ” (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984) (co-authored with Harold D. Kelling), andA KWIC Concordance to Thomas Hardy's “Tess of the d'Urbervilles,” (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989).
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Preston, C.L. The way stylized language means: Pattern matching in the child ballads. Comput Hum 23, 323–332 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02176637
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02176637