The Distribution of Deontic Modals in Jane Austen’s Mature Novels

Lauren Levine


Abstract
Deontic modals are auxiliary verbs which express some kind of necessity, obligation, or moral recommendation. This paper investigates the collocation and distribution within Jane Austen’s six mature novels of the following deontic modals: must, should, ought, and need. We also examine the co-occurrences of these modals with name mentions of the heroines in the six novels, categorizing each occurrence with a category of obligation if applicable. The paper offers a brief explanation of the categories of obligation chosen for this investigation. In order to examine the types of obligations associated with each heroine, we then investigate the distribution of these categories in relation to mentions of each heroine. The patterns observed show a general concurrence with the thematic characterizations of Austen’s heroines which are found in literary analysis.
Anthology ID:
2022.latechclfl-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Stefania Degaetano, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCHCLfL
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
70–74
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.latechclfl-1.9
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lauren Levine. 2022. The Distribution of Deontic Modals in Jane Austen’s Mature Novels. In Proceedings of the 6th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 70–74, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Conference on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Distribution of Deontic Modals in Jane Austen’s Mature Novels (Levine, LaTeCHCLfL 2022)
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