Dear Corpora members, I wonder if you could advise us? We wrote an article on the material of the book by Joan K. Rowling "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", from which we wrote out all the sentences with various functions of the Gerund, Participle 1 and Verbal Noun. We defined 6 functions of the Gerund: 1) gerund as subject; 2) gerund as part of the predicate; 3) gerund as an attribute in preposition to noun; 4) gerund as an attribute in postposition to noun; 5) gerund as an adverb; 6) gerund as an object. Some 5 functions were defined for the Participle 1: 1) participle 1 as part of the complex object; 2) participle 1 as the part of predicate; 3) participle 1 as an attribute in preposition to noun; 4) participle 1 as an attribute in postposition to noun; 5) participle 1 as an adverb. Then, we counted the usage of the Gerund, Participle 1 and Verbal Noun in the text sample of ten thousand words. The number of occurrences of the chosen features of the text of Joan K. Rowling was compared to the number of the analogical functions of the Gerund, Participle 1 and Verbal noun of the texts of 16 British and American writers. We used the standard "chi-criterion" test to check the similarity in the frequencies of these functions. In this way the similarity between Joan K. Rowling and the 16 authers was found out. I wonder if Joan K. Rowling may be interested to know what British or American writer is most similar to her style from this point of view? Unforfunately, I do not know how to send our results to her. May be, a sort of an open letter would be all right if published in some British or American newspaper? I don't know the way out. This is why, I'm looking forward to your advice to yutamb@hotmail.com Be well, remain yours sincerely Yuri Tambovtsev, Novosibirsk Pedagogical university, Novosibirsk, Russia yutamb@hotmail.com
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