Usefulness of categorizing words based on occurances in different parts of the MS?

[Emma May Smith]

So this is an interesting idea, but I think you would struggle to usefully assign semantic values to the words. There's no way to know what any given word might mean and little internal validation for the guesses you'll be forced to make.

With the discussed approach, one does not need to assign semantic values, it would be enough to classify each vord into one of several broad categories based on pre-defined quantitative criteria.

The proposed approach is very much aimed at a semantic goal. It's based on the assumption that different sections of the manuscript deal with certain topics, and that some of those topics may be shared between sections. Hence any word falling across multiple sections must fall into one of the shared topics.

The categorisation is based on potential meaning, however broad the categories would be, and by placing a word in one of those categories you are assigning meaning, however broad. Yet there's unlikely to be a good way of narrowing those categories down sufficiently to make them useful.

A functional approach would be much more likely to result in usable information.