ETS representation of fairy tales

This paper presents a preliminary application of the ETS formalism to the structural representation of Russian fairy tales. We were led to this application through our interest in information retrieval. In addition to introducing a natural multi-level representational view of fairy tales, the ETS formalism suggests an explanation for the mechanism behind plot anticipation by an experienced reader as well as various levels of fairy tale conceptualization. The word morphology means the study of forms. In botany, under morphology one understands the study of constituent parts of plants, of their mutual interrelationships and the whole, in other words the study of plant structure. No one thought of the idea and the term [fairy] tale morphology. However, in the area of folk or folklore tale, consideration of form and the establishment of composition laws is possible with the same accuracy with which morphology of organic compositions allows. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Since the [fairy] tale is exceedingly diverse and probably cannot be studied all at once in its entirety, the material should be subdivided into parts, i.e. classified. Proper classification is one of the first steps in a scientific description, the correctness of further study depends on the correctness of the classification. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 1928 [our translation from Russian] 1 Motivation: information retrieval We chose the domain of fairy tales since it appears that both the structure and semantics of fairy tales as “documents” is more pristine compared to those of many modern documents (e.g. newspaper articles, web pages, and other documents). One of the obvious reasons why fairy tales are more enduring and more universal as compared to practically all present documents is that their structure is less contaminated by various non-essential expository elements so prevalent in modern documents. For example, a typical North American newspaper article is full of insignificant details appearing almost randomly in the text. Since all structural elements of fairy tales are semantically meaningful, they provide a very good database for the investigation of various formalisms for information retrieval (IR). Similar The term “document” is used in this paper as a generic name for a record in a generic information retrieval database.