The Function of Proper Nouns in Quantitative Analysis of Dramas: A Case Study of Karel Čapek’s Plays

Overview & Synopsis

This paper falls in the field of literary onomastics, and the focus of the study is mainly methodological. However, I will present the first results of a quantitative analysis of Čapek’s plays, especially engaging with semantically oriented keywords of the text (prominent units). I introduce the possibilities of using proper nouns for the quantitative analysis of a literary text, specifically a drama, within the framework of content analysis. For this purpose, an annotated corpus of Karel Čapek’s plays was created, which served as a basis for the analysis and was processed in several variants, the most important being segmentation according to a literary character and the distinction between text (dialogues) and metatext (commentary on the characters’ actions, the scene on stage, etc.). The key distinction here is one between proper nouns in dialogues and proper noun labels, i.e. speech prefixes found at the beginning of the lines (dialogues) of individual characters. In this study several methods of quantitative linguistics are used, namely KWs analysis (TF*IDF calculation), the extraction of thematic words (TC/STC indexes of thematic concentration method), an exploration of lexical dispersion (specificity score and neutral, overused, underused KWs), and multidimensional scaling (hierarchical clustering, correspondence analysis).