Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

64 Kristin Bech
that Arthur deviates from the other texts in having twice as many copular coordinate
clauses as non-coordinate clauses (21 out of 33 SVX copular clauses in Arthur are
coordinate clauses). Or, to put it another way, in Arthur, the SVX non-coordinate
clause category contains a lower proportion of copulas than the SVX coordinate
clause category does, and in this it differs from the other texts from that period.
If we disregard the Arthur data, the difference between coordinate and noncoordinate
clauses does not become statistically significant, but the tendency
becomes approximately the same as in early OE (p ≈ 0.14). The reason for the
distribution in Arthur probably has to do with style. In addition to several instances
of the kind of repetitive sequence exemplified in (13), Arthur also uses
coordination when it is not strictly speaking necessary. In (14), for example, the
coordinating conjunction in and his name is sir Ector seems superfluous; the
sentence could just as well have read His name is sir Ector without any loss of
meaning. Likewise, in (15), the second clause could have started with Syr Kay
was made … instead of with the coordinating conjunction.
(14) ‘Wel’, said Merlyn, ‘I knowe a lord of yours in this land that is a passyng true man
and a feithful, and he shal have the nourysshyng of your child; and his name is
sir Ector, and he is a lord of fair lyvelode in many partyes in Englond and Walys.’
(Arthur 10: 36)
(15) … and with hym rode syr Kaynus, his sone, and yong Arthur that was hys nourisshed
broder; and syr Kay was made knyght at Alhalowmas afore (Arthur 13: 21)
Again, what we see here is how the characteristics of individual texts also play
a role with regard to distributional features. 14 In a relatively detailed classification
of the data, as in Tables 2–5, the number of occurrences becomes quite small for
each category, even though the corpus as a whole is quite large. Consequently, it
becomes important to keep an eye on the particular features of the individual texts,
as these might have a bearing on the statistics. In the case of the late ME distribution
of copulas in non-coordinate vs. coordinate clauses, more data are needed
in order to be able to draw conclusions. For the other periods it seems that there
is a clear difference between non-coordinate and coordinate clauses with respect
to copulas, and that this can be seen in light of the functional characteristics of
14. Since the number of clauses collected from each text varies (cf. References), and this may
affect the statistics if the features of individual texts play a role, I also did an experiment where I
‘normalized’ the data, in the sense that I analyzed an equal number of clauses from each text, for
all the features discussed in this paper. For the late OE, early ME and late ME periods I analyzed
150 clauses from each text, and for the early OE period 187/188 clauses from each text, since the
corpus only contains four texts from that period, and I needed an equal number of clauses from
each period. The corpus thus consisted of 3,000 clauses, 750 from each period. The results were
interesting and reassuring, since the distribution of verb types was very similar to the data in