Action quotient

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The action quotient is a stylistic feature of texts suggested by the educator and psychologist Adolf Busemann (psychologist) (1887–1967) in order to be able to differentiate between “action phases” and “quality phases” in the development of children and young people. For this purpose, texts from students were evaluated to determine how the action quotient changes with age. It is defined as Q = a / q. Thereby: Q = “action quotient” a : “actional statements”; q : "qualitative statements". a is determined by adding up all verbs that do not only contain information about location and ownership or existence or part-whole statements; for q all occurrences of “sein” and other auxiliary verbs, appositions and attributes are combined (Busemann 1925: 11–13). On the basis of 470 records from young people aged 9 to 17 on a given topic, Busemann found a particularly high action quotient in the 9 and then again in the 13 year olds and concluded from this that there were periodic changes in the course of development. A comparison with spoken utterances provides another result: the action quotient in spoken language is significantly higher than in written language.

criticism

Busemann's hypothesis was criticized from two directions:

  • Firstly, it is questioned whether there is really a periodic change between action and quality phases; there are studies that give no cause for such a conclusion and rather show a continuous development (e.g. Bakker 1965).
  • Second, the resulting quotient is questioned out of mathematical considerations and an improved model is proposed (Altmann 1978, 1988: 18-23).

Appreciation

It can be stated that Busemann has made a suggestion which, after improvements, is suitable for measuring certain stylistic qualities of texts and then comparing and classifying texts with regard to the measured property. In a further perspective, the question is how this style characteristic relates to others. The aim is to present styles as an interplay of different measurable text properties (Tuldava 2005).

About Busemann

literature

  • Gabriel Altmann : On the use of the quotient in text analysis . In: Gabriel Altmann (ed.): Glottometrika 1 . Brockmeyer, Bochum 1978, pp. 91-106. ISBN 3-88339-030-5 .
  • Gabriel Altmann: Repetitions in Texts . Brockmeyer, Bochum 1988, pp. 18-36. ISBN 3-88339-663-X .
  • Franz J. Bakker: Investigations on the development of the action quotient. In: Archives for the whole of psychology 117, 1965, 78-101. Also in: Hermann Helmers (Ed.): To the language of the child . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1969 pp. 369–401.
  • Adolf Busemann : The language of youth as an expression of the rhythm of development. Language statistical studies . Publishing house by Gustav Fischer, Jena: 1925. Partial print in: Hermann Helmers (Hrsg.): To the language of the child . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1969 pp. 1-59. (Extension of the diss.)
  • Ursula Pieper: About the significance of statistical methods for linguistic style analysis. Narr, Tübingen 1979. ISBN 3-87808-355-6 . On the action quotient as a means of differentiating between text groups: pp. 28, 68f.
  • Juhan Tuldava: Stylistics, author identification. In: Reinhard Köhler, Gabriel Altmann, Gabriel, Rajmund G. Piotrowski (eds.): Quantitative Linguistics - Quantitative Linguistics. An international manual . de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, pp. 368–387; Spec .: 376-377. ISBN 3-11-015578-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ An application of the action quotient to Goethe's Erlkönig is shown in Vivien Altmann, Gabriel Altmann: Instructions for quantitative text analyzes. Methods and Applications. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2008, pp. 104-107. ISBN 978-3-9802659-5-9 .