Using the First Axis of a Correspondence Analysis as an Analytical Tool

Bénédicte Pincemin (1) , Céline Guillot-Barbance (1) , Alexei Lavrentiev (1)

1 IHRIM - Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités

Our corpus of medieval French texts is divided into 59 discourse units (DUs) which cross text genres and spoken vs non spoken text chunks (as tagged with q and sp TEI tags). A correspondence analysis (CA) performed on selected POS tags indicates orality as the main dimension of variation across DUs. We then design several methodological paths to investigate this gradient as computed by the CA first axis. Bootstrap is used to check the stability of observations; gradient-ordered barplots provide both a synthetic and analytic view of the correlation of any variable with the gradient; a way is also found to characterize the gradient poles (here, more-oral or less-oral poles) not only with the POS used for the CA analysis, but also with words, in order to get a more precise and lexical description. This methodology could be transposed to other data with a potential gradient structure.

Mots clés: Old French; textometry; DtmVic software; TXM software; XML TEI; data visualization; 1D model; Correspondence Analysis; methodology; spoken genres

Domaines: Linguistique; Méthodes et statistiques

Bénédicte Pincemin, Céline Guillot-Barbance, Alexei Lavrentiev. Using the First Axis of a Correspondence Analysis as an Analytical Tool: Application to Establish and Define an Orality Gradient for Genres of Medieval French Texts. 14th International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual Data / 14es Journées internationales d'Analyse statistique des Données Textuelles (JADT 2018), DII– Department of Enterprise Engineering “Mario Lucertini” Tor Vergata University; DSS– Department of Statistical Sciences, Sapienza University, Rome, Jun 2018, Roma, Italy. pp.594-601. ⟨halshs-01759219⟩