Kendra Guinness, Shawn Kurta, Jennifer Stevenson and Emma Thompson:
We are four
students of various ages at the University of Pittsburgh working collaboratively in
order to gain a better understanding of the incorporation of nonsense words in the
works of Dr. Seuss.
The corpus selected for this study includes only works written by Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss). Using XML and other tools for computational analysis of literature, we have marked up many of Dr. Seuss's texts, specifically marking any and all nonsense words while noting their part of speech and purpose. The purpose of each nonsense word will be considered to be completing a rhyme, naming an object unique to the text or serving as a proper noun.