<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB"> <O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB">Dear Corpora-List members,</SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB"> <O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB">I’m a PhD student planning to study tag questions in the BNC. I’d like to compare the use in fiction dialogue to that in spoken conversation. In order to compare frequencies I would need to know the proportion of dialogue, i.e. direct speech, in a sub-corpus of the written part restricted to the imaginative domain and book as medium of text (probably also restricted to the UK and Ireland as domicile of author and maybe also restricted to the latest period of time: 1985-1993)</SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB"> <O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB">Does anybody know how large the proportion of direct speech is in this sub-corpus?</SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB"> <O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB">If not, does anybody know how to find out the proportion of direct speech in such a sub-corpus?</SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB"> <O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB">Are there any corpora of just British fiction dialogue?</SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB"> <O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB">The best alternative I know of is the English original fiction part of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus, where direct speech is a possible search restriction. Unfortunately, there are as yet no figures for the proportion of direct speech in it.</SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB"> <O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB">Has anybody done research on the proportion of direct speech in British fiction? There appear to be large differences for different authors (and probably differences between fiction in different genres and different languages).</SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB"> <O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN lang="EN-GB">Many thanks in advance for answers to any of these questions. </SPAN></DIV><BR><BR><DIV> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Best regards,</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Karin Axelsson</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PhD student</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">English Deparment</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Göteborg University</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Sweden</FONT></P> </DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>