抄録
This study investigates the use of reporting clauses in the fourteen Wessex novels by Thomas Hardy. A corpus based on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was constructed by manually annotating all instances of character speech, and Python was used to extract the reporting verbs and their adverbial modification. Quantitative analyses show that verbs occur far more frequently than adverbs, while adverbs display greater lexical diversity. The diachronic comparison reveals a reduction in reporting clauses in Hardy's later works. The gender-based comparison further reveals contrasting patterns: female characters tend to follow a rapport orientation (favoring affective and relational expression), while male characters follow a report orientation (favoring assertive or informational expression). These patterns represent overall distributional tendencies in the corpus rather than uniform character traits across all novels. The findings provide a new empirical foundation for the study of speech presentation in English fiction.
