Crunching numbers in the 'Night Watches of Bonaventura': A computer-aided contribution to author's lexicography

Crunching numbers in the 'Night Watches of
Bonaventura': A computer-aided contribution to author's lexicography

Barbara
Arnold

University of Exeter
b.arnold@exeter.ac.uk

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Analysing the language of a literary text is a complex undertaking. In order
to obtain a complete survey of the literary idiolect of a particular writer,
as defined by his use of individual word and syntactic style, author
dictionaries have proved to be a reliable and informative source of data.
Such data, in the form of a corpus, lends itself to analytical
interpretation by providing a basis for literary and linguistic exegesis.
This presentation will introduce a project, namely the construction of a
dictionary based on a German novel of the early 19th century, 'Nachtwachen von Bonaventura' (Night
Watches of Bonaventura'). Various aspects of computer-based
research in author lexicography will be discussed, focussing on statistical
methods that can be used as a basis for extracting characteristic features
of style and lexis.

1. Preliminary notes
The creation of a dictionary based on the 'Night Watches of
Bonaventura' presented itself as a rewarding and challenging
task for a number of reasons. Firstly, it would make a contribution to the
rather neglected area of author lexicography in general (Mattausch 1990,
1558). Secondly, because a dictionary of this particular text has not
previously been compiled, although the novel is widely considered to be a
valuable source for literary, linguistic and computational research. A
dictionary of the 'Night Watches' appeared able to
serve all of these purposes simultaneously. Being a systematically ordered
collection of language material and with its XML-encoded structure, the
lexicon is intended to be a prototype example of the capabilities of
text-based computing in the humanities, offering easy access to semantic
definitions as well as to a set of sense relations.
Following decades of speculation concerning authorship of the novel, which
was published under the pseudonym 'Bonaventura' in 1804, it can now be taken
as certain that August Klingemann, who had formerly been regarded as a
rather marginal figure in German Romanticism, indeed wrote the 'Night Watches'. The techniques employed to unlock the
puzzle of who wrote as 'Bonaventura' ranged from frequency counts (Fleig
1985) to sophisticated computer-aided approaches (Wickmann 1974).
Irrefutable evidence of Klingemann's authorship emerged when an autograph
originating from him was found in 1987, citing the 'Night
Watches' among his other works (Haag 1987). Knowing who
'Bonaventura' really was marked the beginning of a new epoch in research on
the novel. Now it is the text itself that attracts scholars, as one of the
most recent publications indicates (Kaminski 2001).

2. Crunching numbers in the ‘Night Watches of
Bonaventura’
Compiling a dictionary and processing items of vocabulary lexicographically
both require one simple question to be resolved at the very outset: "What is
a word?" Defining the term 'word' as a primitive carrier of meaning that
exists independently of the syntactical structure (Duden-Grammatik 1998,
870), is certainly an attractive assumption, but it provides no help in
carried out computer-aided text analysis for a language like German, which
is extraordinarily rich in displaying phenomena such as separable prefixes
that appear as "words" in the data file but are not independent of other
elements of the sentence.
Neither is it clear whether abbreviations, numbers or symbols such as Greek
letters, which are employed quite frequently throughout the novel, ought to
be treated as other lemmata or extracted from the word list and presented in
an appendix. Equally troublesome is the problem of proper names. One wonders
whether proper names are proper words at all or whether their status within
the system of language is somewhat different as they refer to individuals
rather than general ideas (Lerner/Zimmermann 1991, 349).
Reviewing the statistical aspects of the corpus material leads to some
fascinating conclusions about the essential ingredients of a literary text.
"Crunching numbers" in Bonaventura's 16 'Night
Watches', the 16 chapters in which the novel is organized, works
on several levels. Counting all the separate "word" units within each
sentence produces a total of 38,785 tokens to be identified by a
word-processing programme. Using Tustep to generate a Kwic-Index of these
parts of speech produces a list of 8,522 types. This number shrinks again
after having reduced the inflected word forms to their canonical form. This
means that we can reduce the 'Night Watches' to a
list of 5739 lemmata in terms of our dictionary.
Not all words appear with equal frequency in the novel. Not surprisingly are
there more contextual occurrences of articles, conjunctions and auxiliary
verbs than of nouns and other mere grammatical words. With a total number of
6,692 occurrences for all the nouns they only form 17.25% of the whole
novel, while this number is easily topped just by counting all the
occurrences for the definite articles der, die,
das (3,576 occurrences), the conjunction und (1,689 occurrences) and the pronouns er, sie, es(1,575 occurrences).
Although these functional words clearly dominate the text, their semantic
meaning remains mainly on the surface. Focussing on the most frequent nouns
on the other hand is much more rewarding in terms of meaning and
interpretational value. A survey such as that given in figure 1 produces a
puzzling effect: Mensch ('human being'; 83
occurrences), Teufel ('devil'; 56 occurrences), Nacht ('night'; 53 occurrences), Kopf ('head'; 51 occurrences), Hand
('hand'; 50 occurrences), Zeit ('time'; 50
occurrences), Gott ('god'; 49 occurrences),
Himmel ('heaven/sky'; 49 occurrences), Liebe ('love'; 47 occurrences) and Tod ('death'; 43 occurrences) are only ten
different types, but they seem to be enough to express the content of the
'Night Watches', disregarding the rest of the
novel.

Figure 1: frequency count of nouns

Another surprising figure is the percentage of those words that appear only
once in the whole of the text: 54.8% of all lemmata are employed only once
throughout the novel, leaving 3,146 entries in the dictionary with single
occurrences.
Some words show a significantly high number of occurrences concentrated in
certain 'Night Watches' only. The verb lieben ('to love') for instance occurs 30 times
throughout the whole of the novel, with an average number of zero to four
occurrences per chapter. Although the semantics of 'love' are implicitly
dealt with in almost each 'Night Watch', there is
only one statistical peak in chapter XIV with 12 references close together.
The antonymic hassen ('to hate') on the other
hand appears only 12 times showing no significant peak at all (figure
2).
Retrieving this sort of information might most conveniently be supported by a
computational programme, e.g. Tom Horton's WordCluster ( ) as the method applied so far, despite using Tustep, still requires
several repetitive procedural actions and quite a considerable amount of
tedious manual interferences.

figure 2: distributional relations of 'lieben / Liebe - hassen / Hass
'

Expressing lexical material in terms of such precise statistics contributes
to a deeper understanding of what poetic texts consist of. For the 'Night Watches' surveys like these become even more
relevant, especially as doubts are still expressed as to the work's
authorship. Assuming that Klingemann was involved in authorship, one recent
publication nevertheless suggests that some parts might originate from
another writer, Clemens Brentano (Braeuer-Ewers 1995, 13).
Computer-generated comparative studies of a variety of narrative prose
showing distributional relations like the above may certainly help to
develop a further insight into the concept of an 'idiolectal fingerprint'
(Cluett 1976).

3. Outlook
Analysing frequency counts and distributional relations are certainly not the
only way in which a dictionary of Klingemann's 'Night
Watches of Bonaventura' can be used in a linguistic context. As
an illustrative article (figure 3) indicates, the dictionary can be used for
different purposes.

figure 3: example of a dictionary article

Besides lemma, word class, frequency, definition and contextual reference
there is a sophisticated system of cross-references at the bottom of each
entry. Here hints on word-formation are given and sense-related pointers
create a network structure of meanings. Each article is generated by
consulting a number of lexicographical reference works. Comparing the
semantic commentaries of dictionaries published during the 18th and 19th
century (Adelung 1793-1801; Campe 1807-11; Grimm 1854-1961) with a reliable
reference work of contemporary German (Duden 1999) leads to insights into
the history of words, including aspects of lexicalisation and changes in
meaning and usage.
The dictionary on the ‘Night Watches of Bonaventura’
is just one part of a larger project dealing with August Klingemann. As
mentioned above linguistic research has to a great extent concentrated on
isolating typical idiolectal ways of expression within the novel for the
purpose of proving authorship. Now that we know its author it makes sense to
compare the vocabulary employed in the ‘Night
Watches’ to that of other items of written work left by
Klingemann. The application of IT facilities may provide interesting
insights into these, too, pointing the way to further potential of
computer-aided research in the field of author lexicography.

Johann
Christoph
Adelung

Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen
Mundart
2nd edn

5 vols
Leipzeig
Breitkopf und Härtel
1793-1801

repr. Hildesheim / New York: Georg Olms, 1970

Ina
Braeuer-Ewers

Züge des Grotesken in den 'Nachtwachen von
Bonaventura'

Paderborn
Schöningh
1995

Joachim
Heinrich
Campe

Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache

5 vols
Braunschweig
Schulbuchhandlung
1807-11

repr. Hildesheim / New York: Georg Olms, 1969

Robert
Cluett

Prose Style and Critical Reading

New York
Teachers College Press
1976

Duden

Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache

Dudenredaktion

3rd edn

10 vols
Mannheim / Leipzig / Wien
Bibliographisches Institut
1999

Duden

Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache

Dudenredaktion

6th edn

Mannheim / Leipzig / Wien
Bibliographisches Institut
1998

Horst
Fleig

Literarischer Vampirismus. Klingemanns 'Nachtwachen von
Bonaventura'

Tübingen
Niemeyer
1985

Jacob
Grimm

Wilhelm
Grimm

Deutsches Wörterbuch

32 vols
Leipzig
Hirzel
1854-1961

Ruth
Haag

Noch einmal: Der Verfasser der Nachtwachen von
Bonaventura

Euphorion

81

286-297
1987

Nicola
Kaminski

Kreuz-Gänge. Romanexperimente der deutschen
Romantik

Paderborn
Schöningh
2001

August
Klingemann

Nachtwachen von Bonaventura

Penig
Dienemann
1804

repr. Frankfurt / Main: Insel Verlag, 1974

Jean-Yves
Lerner

Thomas
E.
Zimmermann

Eigennamen

Semantik. Ein internationales Handbuch der
zeitgenössischen Forschung

Arnim
von Stechow

Dieter
Wunderlich

Berlin
Walter de Gruyter
1991
349-370

Josef
Mattausch

Das Autoren-Bedeutungswörterbuch

Franz
Josef
Hausmann

Oskar
Reichmann

Herbert
Ernst
Wiegand

Wörterbücher. Ein internationales Handbuch zur
Lexikographie

vol 2
Berlin
Walter de Gruyter
1990
1549-1562

Dieter,
Wickmann

Zum Bonaventura-Problem: Eine mathematisch-statistische
Überprüfung der Klingemann-Hypothese

Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Linguistik

4

13-29
1974