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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Dear Corpora members, I wonder if you could advise
us? We wrote an article on the material of the book by Joan K. Rowling "Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", from which we wrote out all the sentences
with various functions of the Gerund, Participle 1 and Verbal Noun. We defined 6
functions of the Gerund: 1) gerund as subject; 2) gerund as part of the
predicate; 3) gerund as an attribute in preposition to noun; 4) gerund as
an attribute in postposition to noun; 5) gerund as an adverb; 6) gerund as an
object. Some 5 functions were defined for the Participle 1: 1) participle 1 as
part of the complex object; 2) participle 1 as the part of predicate; 3)
participle 1 as an attribute in preposition to noun; 4) participle 1 as an
attribute in postposition to noun; 5) participle 1 as an adverb. Then, we
counted the usage of the Gerund, Participle 1 and Verbal Noun in the text sample
of ten thousand words. The number of occurrences of the chosen features of
the text of Joan K. Rowling was compared to the number of
the analogical functions of the Gerund, Participle 1 and Verbal noun of
the texts of 16 British and American writers. We used the
standard "chi-criterion" test to check the similarity in the frequencies of
these functions. In this way the similarity between Joan K. Rowling and
the 16 authers was found out. I wonder if Joan K. Rowling may be interested
to know what British or American writer is most similar to her style from this
point of view? Unforfunately, I do not know how to send our results to her. May
be, a sort of an open letter would be all right if published in some British or
American newspaper? I don't know the way out. This is why, I'm looking forward
to your advice to <A href="mailto:yutamb@hotmail.com">yutamb@hotmail.com</A> Be
well, remain yours sincerely Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk Pedagogical
university, Novosibirsk, Russia <A
href="mailto:yutamb@hotmail.com">yutamb@hotmail.com</A>
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