Probabilistic Interpretations Of Projection: A Preliminary Study Of The Original And Simplified Versions Of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

Systemic-functional linguistics has an insight that the nature of a language system is inherently probabilistic and the probability is instantiated as frequency in text. Due to the development of corpus and computational software, massive quantitative studies have found that grammatical systems mainly fall into two types: equiprobable with a probability of 0.5/0.5 and skewed with a probability of 0.9/0.1. Probability also defines register in a way that register variation is the resetting of probability in grammatical systems in the context of situation. Many studies have been conducted in this regard but a distinctive text group receives inadequate attention– simplified versions of literary originals.This thesis tries to address this by investigating the probability distributions of projection in the original and four simplified versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The analysis is assisted by two computational tools developed by Wu (2000), namely, SysConc (a concordance tool) and SysFan (a manual analysis tool). Tentative research results show a reverse in the probability distribution of paratactic idea to hypotactic one in the original and simplified versions: 0.42/0.58 to 0.59/0.41. This perturbation either suggests a possibility for an emergence of a new register variation characterized by having paratactic idea as an unmarked term, or cancel out in larger scale quantitative studies. Applying ERMS (Yan, 2005), a readability formula, the study also indicates that higher probability of paratactic idea is related to higher readability scores. The importance of this study lies in that it suggests it is worthwhile to conduct further invesitgation from a holistic perspective of lexicogrammar in this regard. This study has implications for guiding the writing of simplified versions and testing their readability.