© 1993 by Association for Literary & Linguistic Computing
Articles |
Mapping Echoes with TACT in the Old French Epic the Charroi de Nîmes1
New College, University of Toronto Canada
Edward A. Heinemann, Department of French, New College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1.
Repetition in the Old French epic is proving to go far beyond the epic cliché and the ‘oral formula’, and a number of texts show brilliant use of echo as an aesthetic device. Computerized searches tracing such recurrences, however, are hindered by an often elaborate play of variation in the echoes. TACT, conceived to integrate results of searches ‘into’ the textbase, permits a cumulative discovery process through indexing. Storing the rules which conduct the searches, it keeps a record serving as a formal description of variables and constants in the echoes; indexing the positions of the echoes and of their individual components, it permits retrieval of those signified as well as of the signifiers. After describing briefly the fact of repetition in the genre and the problems posed by the variation of expression in repetitions (Section 1) and the two-phase approach to tagging under TACT (Section 2), we examine the complicated weave of constants and variables found in the Charroi de Nîmes (Section 3) and the progressive approach to their discovery and indexing under TACT (Section 4), and we conclude with a summary of those tools offered by TACT which serve this project (Section 5) and of lines of further enquiry both in the Charroi and in the genre in general (Section 6).