Similarities in spontaneous speech and dialogue in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - How does the tense use in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone compare to the tense use in the Switchboard corpus?

Abstract

The research that is conducted is embedded in the project Time in Translation of which the supervisor is the PI. In this project verb usage in different languages ​​is compared on the basis of parallel corpora. One of the questions the research group ran into is to what extent the dialogues in a novel - at least in terms of verb usage - can be compared to everyday language in informal conversations. In this thesis, an answer to this question is formulated by comparing the dialogue actions in Harry Potter with those in the Switchboard corpus. The dialogue act annotation system has been developed in computational semantics, with which this thesis is situated on the border between linguistics and computer science. The empirical results are supplemented with relevant statistical tests. The results show a difference in verb usage in novels and naturally occurring speech. In addition to that, the research concludes that Harry Potter contained more questions than the Switchboard corpus. A lot of these differences are due to the nature of the corpora. It is interesting to note that no difference has been found in the occurrence of the Present Perfect across the corpora. To find out more the entire thesis is available and you may always contact the author.