Investigation of General Extenders in 18th Century Novels
Thompson Olusegun Ewata
Adekunle Ajasin University
Akungba Akoko Ondo State Nigeria
ABSTRACT
On account of Overstreet’s (1999) “There is little doubt that general extenders have been part of the English language for many years.” and Carroll’s (2008) “… extender tag can be found throughout the history of English”, this study sets out to investigate if the use of the English general extenders dates back to the 18th century English society in the novels written in the period. The choice of the novel genre and literature is because both are reflections of the society that produced them. Historically, the development of the novel genre started in the 18th century and it said that writing and indeed literature reflects the sense and sensibilities of the age that produced it, it will give us the opportunity to see how the use of language has been enhanced and preserved through writing. Three English novels, Robinson Crusoe, Joseph Andrews and Gulliver’s Travels that were precursors of the novel genre formed the corpus of the study. The PDF version of the novels were downloaded on the Internet using Adobe PDF® Reader XI and the “Find” menu option was used to search for the identified items in the novels using the methodologies of computational linguistic and content analysis. The study discovers that the novels the adjunctive and the disjunctive general extenders and they were used 200 and 200 tokens respectively.
Keywords: General Extenders, Computation Linguistics, Content Analysis, Novel, 18th Century