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Analysing Major Barbara
Task A - Our answer
| Character |
Words |
Turns |
Average |
|
Lady Britomart
|
355
|
16
|
22.2
|
|
Stephen
|
131
|
15
|
8.7
|
On this calculation Lady Britomart's average is roughly two and a half
times more than Stephen's, suggesting her conversational dominance. You
may get slightly different figures from us, depending upon how you treated
hyphenations, apostrophes, and so on. But the overall pattern is unlikely
to be significantly different.
Arguably, the discrepancy between the two characters is even higher than
this. Note that, in order to limit the task for you we ended the extract
in the middle of one of Lady Britomart's turns. The whole turn, of which
we have given you just 15 words, is actually 126 words long! And in our
representation of the text we have treated turns 2 and 3 as two separate
turns for Lady Britomart, because of what, from the stage directions,
look like a significant pause. If these two turns were treated as one,
the average number of words per turn for Lady Britomart would increase
even further.
Stephen's turns vary between 1 and 14 words. Lady Britomart's vary between
2 and 41 words (or 126 words if you include the whole of the last turn).
So her variation is much larger than Stephen's, reflecting changes in
her attitude. Her two-word utterance 'Presently Stephen' in turn 2, when
she stops him from talking while she finishes writing, seems very curt.
Her longest turn in our extract (turn 19) is, ironically, when she is
telling Stephen that he must take more responsibility and advise her.
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