Description of Propp’s Roles in Russian Magic Folktales презентация

University, Russia
anna_raf@rambler.ru

characters with SKAZKA-2
Semantic relations and primitives
Parents and their roles: preliminary results
Hero, false hero and helper
Can the role be changed?
Conclusions

tale with 7 roles:
Villain – Dispatcher
Donor – Hero
Helper – False hero
Princess and her father

function of the donor (investigates hero), receipt of a magical agent (gives the hero some magical object, helper or advice).
hero: hero’s reaction (to the 1st donor’s action), wedding.

characters, as the hero kills the villain dragon, and the dragon's sisters take on the villainous role of chasing him. One character can engage in acts as more than one role, as a father can send his son on the quest and give him a sword, acting as both dispatcher and donor.

to bride-investigator
Valued objects: from helper to bride
Valued objects + Investigators: bride-investigator and villain bride

as set of functions or as system of characters and their roles.
One role can be distributed among various characters and one character can act in two or more roles.
I suppose, that automated analysis of folktales can be based on description of characters and their roles.

Now it contains a corpus of Russian folktales (about 1000 texts) and also provides some tools to prepare data for scholar. For example, the program can make frequency dictionary of the entire corpus or its part, list of concordances for words, given by user, and so on.
SKAZKA-2 also includes additional data (description of each folktale and the index of East-Slavic folktales), that will be used later.

set of characters (for example, frequency or statistical analysis, simple search in text or database and so on);
Some kind of linguistic data and software (for example, Russian dictionaries and programs for morphological analysis);
Data and program tools, that are developed especially to deal with folktales (or only magic folktales), for example, a motif-index, a list of keywords and rules for automated motif search or an index of characters.

interesting by itself, and an index of characters can be used for a number of purposes, for example, for automated motif definition. Now an index of characters in the form of semantic network is under constructions. It connects characters, as they are given in folktale, their roles in fairy tale and other semantic relations.

is necessary to add new roles, additional to Propp’s ones. For example, prince can be hero, helper (rarely) or false hero, but he can also be watcher or informer; cat can be helper, object of difficult task or one of hero’s forms, if hero is magically transformed into cat. Cat can also be one of witch’s helpers or servants. The list of roles is open now and is developing together with network (additional roles are underlined).

for SEmantic Classification) software is used. ProSeCa is developed by A.A. Kretov and author to describe lexical semantics of Russian language. The program treats semantic network as a set of paths from beginning vertices to final ones, it helps user to make paths, links every path with one or more text examples and makes a dictionary of vertices.

медведь (bear) ---(role)---> helper (Afanasjev 157);
медведица, медведиха (she-bear)---(sex: female)--->медведь (bear)---(is a)---> сильное дикое животное (strong wild animal)---(role)---> donor (Afanasjev 202, 204).

father (villain I)
one of hero’s forms (transformation into bear as hero’s ability)
one of hero’s and his wife’s forms (transformation into bear as punishment)
one of bride’s forms (as the result of enchantment)
strong and dangerous wild animal
wild animal as an object of hunt

forms
one of hero’s forms
symbolic description of hero
rare object
magic object
transport
one of witch’s servants

and her bridegroom

children are heroes (rescue from villain)
II: hero, mother’s/sister’s lover becomes villain
Hero and his brother/blood-brother:
I: hero and helper
II: hero and false hero
Hero and his bride:
I: hero and bride-helper
II: heroine in quest for her lost bridegroom

folktales.
The network can be used for automated search of motives or tales of given type, it lets us study relations between characters through the entire corpus or it’s part.
Ties of relationship can change the role of given character. Helpers (brothers or blood-brothers of hero) sometimes become false heroes. Son of the heroine can later act as helper and even hero (marry the princess).
For further work, some tools to deal with graph (for example, visualization or extracting sub graph) should be added.
After construction of network, an index of folktale characters could be based on it.