Het is groen en leeft nog lang en gelukkig. Classificatie van volksverhaalgenres op basis van formules

Samenvatting

Different folktale genres make use of various conventional ways of starting a story. How well can we predict the genre of a folktale based on these opening formulas? In this paper I show by means of computational analysis that Dutch and Frisian folktale formulas in many cases already provide enough information to correctly classify a folktale according to its genre. A more in-depth analysis reveals that idiomatic, fully lexically-specified opening phrases serve not only as predictors of genre but also as more abstract schemas with open slots at different levels of abstraction. I characterize the formulas by classifying them according to their primary communicative functions.