HSS30048 Austen's Novels, Hypothetically by Seohyon Jung

Kwanwoo Lee(20230473)

kw040114 — 2025-09-25 06:40:17 UTC

Austen's novel includes so many address terms such as "mr"(5648, top), "mrs"(2531) and "miss"(1997). I was wondering whether other authors' works includes it. But it is the characteristic of Austen's novels. In addition, it also shows large number of the word "said". So I guess that her works will contain a lot of conversations b/w characters. I think that Jane Austen want to express the inner side through the conversation since it is important to notice the characters' emotion and attitude in its genre.

Q. What does the conversations in her novel mainly represent for? (Emotions, Facts...)

According to the genre(romance), I expect that the most of conversations will be mainly about the speakers' emotion.

Sophiya Shrestha

sophiya050_1 — 2025-09-25 06:40:31 UTC

Collocates:

(Is the narrative focused on male or female characters? Do these characters exist outside their relationship with each other?)

said>>mrs. - 167

said>>miss - 135

said>> lady - 51

said>>mr. - 165

said>>sir - 50

he>>mrs. - 757 (top)

he>>mr. - 746

he>>said - 661

he>>miss - 526

she>>felt - 335 (top)

she>>mr. - 305

she>>mrs. - 262

she>>said - 257

she>>miss - 233

Taejun Kim(20230191)

2025-09-25 06:45:01 UTC

As a result of analyzing through the Voyant tool, the word that appears most often in Jane Austen's novels was 'said'. Through this, it can be seen that Austen's works are usually centered on conversations between characters, and the story is mainly conveyed through conversations. On the other hand, relatively few words were found to indicate an emotion or a psychological state. From this point of view, it can be assumed that Austen preferred a method of allowing the reader to guess the character's emotions through actions and speech that are subtly revealed in the conversation rather than directly describing the inner side of the characters. Therefore, I thought that the reader should find meaning more than just reading the conversation and carefully interpret the character's inner feelings.

20230508_SominLee

kj5wfywxp9 — 2025-09-25 06:45:35 UTC

I searched the word 'love', 'friend*' and observed the graph. It was interesting that she did not mention friends in 'Love and Friendship' / And she starts to talk more about friends and less about love
Then what is it actually about? (I don't know about the story yet)
In 'Love and Friendship', the word 'father' appeared the most in at the first time. After, it changed to 'love'
In links, 'Love' is connected with 'Mr', 'man', 'woman' / 'Friend' is connected with both 'Mr', 'Ms'

Seoyoon Lee

littleschool3215 — 2025-09-25 06:46:37 UTC

I concentrated on the word 'said.'

The collocating words were - besides nouns, Mr, and Mrs- mostly 'dear', 'soon', 'little', 'good', which seemed neutral or positive. I was curious how Austen described negativity in her novels to found that with the word said the word nonsense was used quite often. For the word think, 'worse', 'wretchedly', 'ungrateful', 'poor' etc. were used with it.

It seemed Austen made the characters keep negative thoughts to themselves and tried not to show them. I also had questions about how other novels showed human relations and conversations in that time period.

Onvilasinee Leekumnerdthai (Hana)

onvilasinee — 2025-09-25 06:46:47 UTC

Every story of hers has a main female character, which makes "Mr." the only word referring to men as one of the most frequently used. Other than the names, Austen mentioned "sister" or "mother" the most in a positive way, and "father" in neutral or negative.
From all the nouns, top4 are time, dear, man, and day. Maybe because the girls in that era did not have a chance to do a full-time job so they focus on time/day waiting for men (?)

Yun Soye

yunsoye0410 — 2025-09-25 06:47:00 UTC

Jane Austen emphasized the importance of economic stability in marriage, but at the same time she believed that a true marriage must be accompanied by genuine love and respect. ⇒ In her novels the word marriage is likely to appear with both negative and positive terms. By conducting a collocation analysis and examining word trends across the narrative flow, one can gain insights into her views on marriage. (In Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma)

Group of words

(a) Marriage-related words: marr*, husband

(b) surrounding environment of the married individuals: family-related terms, people, neighbor, house…

(d) true marriage: lov*, happ,*

Hypotheses

In Jane Austen’s novels, words from groups (b), (c), and (d) will frequently appear as collocates of (a).
Among the collocates of (a) (marr*), words from group (c) will decrease in frequency over the course of the narrative, while words from group (d) will increase.

1. Collocates of (a)

(b) house, people, sister, father, son, mother, family

(d) love, great, happiness

2. Trend analysis of words collocating with (a)

To examine the tendencies of words that collocating with group (a), trend analysis is conducted for each novel. In order to clearly observe these patterns, the term marr* itself also be included in the graph together with its collocates.

Taewhan Lee(20210527)

2025-09-25 06:51:02 UTC

bad vs evil

good vs great

I think two of words are representatives of negative meaning

I wonder is there a inclination that austen's preference.

i find interesting points good vs great graph in each books have symmetry of y-axis

=> there is no preference of austen. maybe i think she tried not to use same word reapeatly. Also you can see that the two words are beta. When one is used, the other is used less.

Kanokkorn Chaovaviwat (Meemi)

mimekanokkorn346 — 2025-09-25 13:33:52 UTC

In all of Austen’s novels, the total number of the word “marri*” (about 500) and “engage*” (about 484) are quite close. In most novels, the word “marry” appears more frequently than the word “engage” throughout the whole story. However, the only exception is Northanger Abbey, which is the only novel where the total number of “marry” is lower.

So, does Northanger Abbey differ from Austen’s other works in any aspect? Is the protagonist in a different situation, or perhaps at a different stage of life?

Jaehee Kim (20210146)

2025-09-26 06:22:24 UTC

In this novel, there are totally 781,763 words and 15,368 kinds of different words. In fact, each words are used averagely 50 times.

However, the word 'mr' is used 3,117 times, which occurs most. To analyze how this word used, 'knightley'(321 times), 'darcy'(254 times) are usually collocate with 'mr' in this novel. As we know, knightley is a woman's name and darcy is a unit of penetration ratio. Therefore, we can assume that this novel is about transmitting with some woman.

Jeongmin Jo

2025-09-26 08:32:43 UTC

I searched for the stems miss*, love*, happ*, great*, friend*, delight* and compared segment trends. It was interesting that miss* spikes mid–late, while happ* peaks at the end.

Hypothesis

Mid sections: title-driven social choreography (Miss + X) + evaluation language (a great deal).

Late sections: emotion shift from in love → happy (closure & marriages).

Links between words

Love, marriage/proposal/attachment
Great, pleasure/joy/deal
Friend, dear/true/intimate
miss (verb), not/shall + miss (rarer but marks longing/error)

20240660 Jung YeongHun

2025-09-26 11:02:01 UTC

- Hypothesis: the frequency ratio of words such as mr, miss, lady, and sir indicate who is more leading, female or male in the book.

e.g. Pride and Prejudice and Emma, the ratio of mr is significantly higher than that of miss, lady → women speak more proactively?

- In Emma, compared to other works, mr, miss, little, say, great, question, etc., appear the most, and lady, sister, house, etc. appear the least. In particular, the frequency of words mr and miss within Emma tends to be inversely proportional to each other

- In addition, Emma has fewer words related to family, such as mother, sister, brother, and aunt, except father, compared to other works.

- The frequency of word "love" continues to decrease along time

- Character names such as crowford, emma, and elinor mostly appear in only one book and appear with words such as mr and ms. However, Catherine appears in three works: Lady Susan, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, and Elizabeth appears in Love and Friendship, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion

Yeonwoo Son(20230352)

2025-09-28 09:46:50 UTC

Among Jane Austen's 8 novels, the most frequently occurring words are Mr (3117), Mrs (2531), and Said (2165). But are these words ranked the most frequently in each individual novel? To investigate this, I have identified the top three most frequent words in each novel.

Said 99, dear 80, lady 80

Lady 116, Vernon 104, Susan 84

Elinor 623, mrs 530, Marianne 492

Mr 785, Elizabeth 597, mrs 343

Fanny 816, Crawford 493, mr 482

Mr 1153, Emma 786, mrs 699

Catherine 428, miss 206, tilney 196

Anne 447, captain 303, mrs 291

The frequent words are each of main character’s names, Honorifics, and the verb “said”. It is natural for the main character’s name to appear most frequently in each novel. So do Honorifics and the verb “Said”. It’s because the stories are driven by dialogue and character relationship in the novel.

Hyeongseop Kim

2025-09-28 12:58:00 UTC

I examined three words, "oh", "yes", "cried", and their collocations. They seemed to occur in similar contexts, which might explain why they have quite similar ratios of relative frequencies. Interestingly, the relative frequencies of these words in Lady Susan are very low--especially the relative frequency of "yes", which is 0. I wonder what makes this difference... the storyline? the character(s)? And what does this result imply?

20240756 최재윤

2025-09-28 14:46:58 UTC

I formulated a hypothesis about Jane Austen’s novels. Like most novels, they generally follow a structure of introduction, development, climax, and resolution. Therefore, if I analyze the words used in the novel, I expected that negative words such as “sad” and “worry” to appear more frequently in the middle sections of the stories, while positive words such as “joy” and “happy” would be used most often at the beginning and the end. After conducting an actual analysis, I obtained results like the ones shown in the image, which allowed me to test and support my hypothesis.

20250847 김윤수

2025-09-29 02:09:47 UTC

I think words ‘mrs’ ‘mr’ ‘said’ show the features of the author. Mrs and Mr’s collocate is the main character’s name. I think this words are used to show status. Our society reveal someone’s status by what others call his name. In this context, Mr and mrs also used for it. And I assume that the word ‘said’ is frequent because this story is composed of conversation.

20230864 Khwankhao Piamtaweesak (KK)

2025-09-29 07:30:34 UTC

The use of the word 'time' (8th place) by Jane Austen was quite stable (less fluctuated) throughout her works compared to other top-used words. It seems like she used this word in all her stories with a nearly similar amount.

The word 'time' was the most often used to indicate time in Jane Austen's works, followed by the words 'soon' and 'day.'

If we zoom in on the contexts, most of them are 'this time,' 'at time,' 'time of,' 'one time,' etc, which are simple phrases to tell when of what happened. I also searched for the use of the word 'time' in Shakespeare's plays and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; they also used a lot of the word 'time', but with more fluctuation of relative frequencies among each work.

Therefore, I hypothesize that Jane Austen's style of writing included simple time indication for readers to understand chronology easily.

Sangmin Bae

sangminbae — 2025-09-29 11:13:11 UTC

I focused on the words related to marriage, family, and parents. Related words shows the cultural mood around the time she wrote those novels.

Hypothesis :

(a) The overall view of marriage during those era had more negative views due to discrimination about women(including violence), greediness, although there are positive views like achievement of true love, financial stabilization of an individual.

(b) There are prevalent discrimination against women when it comes to marriage or as a family.

(1) marriage -> Mr, Mrs

marriage -> good

marriage -> young

marriage -> fanny

marriage -> love

(2) engagement -> Mr, Mrs, Miss

engagement -> great

engagement -> fanny

engagement -> happy

These words related to words 'marriage' and 'engagement' generally shows that people around that era had marriage when they were young, as they thought, so it would be very young for thoughts of our generation.

(a) Also, we can tell that those people had a positive feeling about getting married and build a family, rather than negative feelings according to term love, and happy are associated with marriage and engagement. If we look into Fanny's view of marriage, we can relate to this even more

(b) One part I misunderstood is the word 'fanny' is a belliting term against women, so it could mean a discrimination between men and women even when it comes to marriage. But this is a name of a character, the author may intended this, but other than that, it seems there are not really a relation of a discrimination.

Sumin Cho

2025-10-01 01:45:18 UTC

Observation
- The word "mr" peaks in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815). This indicates the narrative importance of male characters.
- The word "mrs" peaks in Sense and Sensibility (1811), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1818). This reflects the significance of married women in the storyline.
- Also, "miss", "said", and "think" are also peaks in Jane Austen's novels.
Hypothesis
My hypothesis is that "The frequency of social titles(e.g., Mr., Mrs., Miss) in Jane Austen's novels reflects the thematic focus and social networks central to each work. For instance, the prominence of "mr" and "miss" in Pride and Prejudice and Emma highlights the marriage market and the roles of young men and women in society. In contrast, the higher frequency of "mrs" in Persuasion suggests a shift toward married women and more mature relationships in Austen's later works.