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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.1368-1388
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 06 Oct 2022 Revised 12 Dec 2022 Accepted 30 Dec 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202212.1368

A Quantitative Analysis of the Little Red Riding Hood Types and Story Element-Function-Plot Relations

Jungsik Park ; Ho Han
(1st author) Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Ajou University jspark@ajou.ac.kr
(corresponding author) Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Ajou University hhan@ajou.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Tale types of “Little Red Riding Hood” have survived through oral transmission in various areas including Europe, Africa, and Asia and can even be traced back to 10th century in a written form. This research presents quantitative analyses on the folkloric landscape of tales of, or related to, what is best known as Little Red Riding Hood through the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) index, of which we analyzed ATU 333, ATU 123, and other unspecified types, based on logistic regression and decision tree. The quantitative analyses of the Little Red Riding Hood tale types indicate that ATU 123 alone has the specific story segments that are important to the formation of the tale type and that though diversified in story segments and other details, the three types shared the distinct plot sequence as an important feature. In addition, eight event descriptors and six character and setting descriptors are found to be meaningful factors in the formation of ATU 123. It can be further argued that the plot as an abstraction played a major role in the formation of the tales we have now. Also demonstrated in this paper is that researchers can yield substantial insights into the quantitative results while cross-checking them with qualitative analyses.

Keywords:

Little Red Riding Hood, logistic regression, feature importance, story element, plot, motif

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ajou University research fund.

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments. Of course, all errors are the authors’ responsibility.

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