Extended Context at the Introduction of Complex Vocabulary in Abridged Literary Texts (2024)

Abstract: Psycholinguistics speaks of a fine-tuning process used by parents as they address children, in which complex vocabulary is introduced with additional context (Leung et al., 2021). This somewhat counterintuitive lengthening of text in order to aid one’s interlocutor in the process of language acquisition also comes in accord with Harris (1988)’s notion that for every complex sentence, there is an equivalent longer (non-contracted) yet simpler one that contains the same amount of information. Within the proposed work, a corpus of eight renowned literary works (e.g. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Les Misérables) in four distinct languages (English, French, Russian and Spanish) is gathered: both the original (or translated) versions and up to four abridged versions for various audiences (e.g. children of a defined age or foreign language learners of a defined level) are present. The contexts of the first appearance of complex words (as determined based on word frequency) in pairs of original and abridged works are compared, and the cases in which the abridged texts offer longer context are investigated. The discovered transformations are consequently classified into three separate categories: addition of vocabulary items from the same lexical field as the complex word, simplification of grammar and insertion of a definition. Context extensions are then statistically analysed as associated with different languages and reader audiences.

## introduction the cambridge dictionary defines thus the verb 'to abridge': "to make a book, play, or piece of writing shorter by removing details and information that is not important". similarly, the collins dictionary claims that 'to abridge' means "to reduce the length of (a written work) by condensing or rewriting". despite this focus on textual length, however, it is logical to assume, in light of linguistic and psycholinguistic theory, that a mere reduction in size would be insufficient for said transformation to act as a 'bridge' (as its name implies) for an audience that would otherwise have difficulty in accessing a given text. this work, which builds upon nikolova-stoupak (2023)'s related findings, deliberately seeks and systematises instances where abridged literary works provide longer context than their original counterparts; specifically, when complex vocabulary is introduced. particular contributions in the process include the composition of a larger corpus of full and abridged versions of famous literary works (including a significant variety of abridged versions in terms of audience, such as readers with comprehension difficulties and foreign language learners of several languages and levels), the exploration of both nouns and verbs as complex words on the basis of frequency lists, the inclusion of contexts that do not necessarily relate to identical parts of the examined texts and an elaborate pipeline that allows for the extraction and analysis of relevant textual samples. the two main research questions investigated within the present work are: 1. does complex vocabulary appear in a longer context (sentence) within an abridged rather than full literary text more frequently than random vocabulary? 2. when present, can the mentioned lengthening of context in an abridged text be further systematised with the help of specific examples and relevant linguistic theory? ## results a total of 720 sentence pairs per scenario (i.e. in relation to random versus complex nouns and verbs) were extracted from the corpus, ten per each full-abridged textual pair of the same literary work in the same language. there were 221 cases of longer sentences pertaining to the abridged text within the random sample (i.e. 30.69%) and 222 cases when only complex words were considered (30.83%). due to the closeness of results, it is concluded that the null hypothesis, namely that abridged versions are as likely to involve longer context when they contain complex words, could not be rejected at this point. when all sentence pairs related to complex words where the abridged sentence was longer were manually investigated, only 64 of them (28.83%) were discovered to factually conform to the presence of additional context associated with the vocabulary item in question. in the rest of the cases, the added length was attributable to textual processing (e.g. a punctuation sign being erroneously marked as a noun or verb during pos tagging or different punctuation leading to different textual units being extracted as sentences) or to the presence of additional information that, however, has no link to the complex word. in addition, some examples were disregarded where the examined words were not definable as complex despite their absence in the frequency lists (e.g. 'cake', 'pique-nique' ('picnic', fr.)). conversely, the present words that were conjugated forms of a common verb, a frequent phenomenon in french and spanish text (e.g. 'pronunciaba' -'to pronounce', sp., 1st/3rd person singular, imperfect tense), were taken to correctly represent complex vocabulary due to their difficult comprehension and use by children and non-native speakers. ## discussion going back to research question 1 as stated in section 1, the null hypothesis was not rejected in an initial experiment that compared proceedings of clib 2024 the number of instances where abridged texts contained longer sentences than their full counterparts in a random sample and in a sample associated with complex vocabulary. however, it was discovered that, in fact, less than half of the cases where the abridged sentences were longer were actually attributable to extended context related to the examined word (rather than to specificities of textual processing, for example). therefore, results would be more accurate if the experiment is repeated with a larger sample and/or includes manual filtering of the sentences. moreover, additional factors may exert an influence on the length of sentences within a literary text. for instance, translators have an established tendency to 'simplify' and/or 'explicate' a work's original text, thus respectively reducing and extending the size of context @xcite . as regards research question 2, when present, extended context within abridged texts was indeed systematisable as belonging to three main types: addition of vocabulary items of the same lexical field, transformations into simpler grammar (such as anaphora resolution and addition of implied personal pronouns) and definitions of the investigated complex vocabulary item. the first and third types are relatable to harris (1988)'s notion of 'report' (description, definition), while the second type resembles the linguist's notion of 'paraphrase' (morphological and syntactic modification). instances of added vocabulary were most numerous, potentially speaking of the importance for learners to acquire knowledge of a new word along with its common collocations and in a common and natural usage scenario (rather than through an explicit definition, for example). in addition, lexical fields are of key importance in the understanding of discourse. the words belonging to one field are used in a systematised pattern throughout a text and may as much as appear synonymously as anaphora referents (e.g. the phrase "i climbed (...)", as used without a direct object being followed by the definitive "the peak(...)" in the next sentence)(christophe et al., 2010). also, as demonstrated in de bot et al. (1997)'s experiment, readers make especially high use of discourse content in order to determine the meaning of an unknown lexical item. evidence was found that grammatical transformations are significantly more common in morphologically rich languages like russian and spanish while, as de bot et al. (1997) point out, languages like english and french, which have fewer word categories and argument structures, are associated with easier syntactic inference of a new word's meaning. it also appears that a larger variety of extended context is offered to foreign language learners. when it comes to the lack of detected instances of the investigated feature in relation to texts targeted for readers with comprehension difficulties, it is at least partly explainable through the fact that proceedings of clib 2024 finally, the study revealed additional cases of simplified vocabulary and grammar in sentences containing complex vocabulary that are worthy of notice despite not directly leading to an increase in length, as they demonstrate a curious tendency for balance to be sought within the overall complexity present in an abridged textual unit. for instance, an abridged text thus uses a simpler verb as associated with the complex noun 'fragancia': "cuya fragancia hacía recordar" foot_7 ("whose fragrance made remember"; sp.) in place of "fragancia que evocaba" foot_8 ("a fragrance that evoked"; sp.). likewise, a negative sentence that contains a relatively complex conjugated verb, like "vous ne me reconnaissez pas ?" foot_9 ("don't you recognise me?"; fr.) is made positive in an abridged text: "vous me reconnaissez ?" foot_10 ("do you recognise me?"; fr.). ## conclusion and future directions the current study shows that there are cases when abridged literary works make use of extended rather than reduced context, in particular when it comes to the introduction of complex vocabulary. several distinct types of context extension are detected, and there is evidence that their application and frequency are language-specific. however, further work is required in order to determine the particular cases in which the practice is applied as well as its efficiency. the authors are planning for the latter to be evaluated through a reading comprehension survey, in which pairs of short texts will be presented, one of which will introduce complex vocabulary through extended context in scenarios resembling the ones found within the examined corpus. to go further, a tendency has been detected for complex vocabulary to influence its context in ways that are not related to length but to overall complexity in terms of syntax and vocabulary. this claim deserves to be further investigated in order for optimal abridgement practices to be defined that coincidentally render a text simpler and encourage vocabulary acquisition.