The statistical characteristics of Fairy tale’s style: evidence from the intertextual contrastive analysis

Abstract  Fairy tale, as a kind of literary genre, is an important reading material for children. Previous researches study fairy tale from the perspective of literary comparison, literary development and linguistics. Some researches make comment on the writer or their works or both. But a few researches have been done from the perspective of cognitive representational categories. This research will study the statistical characteristics of fairy tales from this perspective. The statistics used in the study of fairy tale can be more objective, more effectively to show the language characteristics of fairy tale. Two typical fairy tales, Peter Pan and Wendy and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz will be used as research materials. The research will mark these two fairy tales from color terms, time phrases, number pf places, numbers, characters and repetition of sentences six aspects. After annotation and statistics, Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test will be used for data analysis. The research found that the two rankings of the values do not differ significantly from each other, suggesting that there is a typical distribution of the observed items in fairy tales. According to the statistic results, the research discusses about the statistic characteristics of fairy tale in detail.

Key Words: Fairy tale, statistic characteristic, cognitive representational categories49359

童话的统计特征：来自跨篇对比分析的证据

摘要童话是一种特殊的文学体裁，是儿童重要的阅读资源。以往的童话研究一般从文学比较，起源和发展，语言学等领域进行分析研究；也有学者针对某一童话作者或其童话作品从文学、美学等角度进行文学研究。但较少有学者从认知表征范畴对童话语言的特征进行统计和分析。将统计法运用于童话研究能更客观，更有力地展现童话语言的特征。本文选取了两篇童话文本进行研究，对颜色、时间、地点、数字、人物以及重复语句六个特征进行标注和统计，采用Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test对统计所得数据进行分析，发现这两篇童话在这六个方面没有明显差别，表明童话语言确实有典型的分布规律和特征。本文将根据数据统计结果，深入探讨童话语言的特征。

毕业论文关键词：童话；统计特征；认知表征

Contents

1 Introduction 2

1.1 The aim of the thesis 2

1.2 The Organization of the thesis 3

2 Literature Review 3

2.1 Fairy tale 3

2.1.1 Previous studies on fairy tales 4

2.2 Fairy Tale and Children’s language development 5

3 Methodology 7

3.1 Material 7

3.1.1 Peter Pan and Wendy 7

3.1.2 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 7

3.2 Research Method 8

3.3 Data Collection 9

4 Discussions 10

4.1 Discussion about the research results