Abstract
A Corpus Stylistic Study of Singular and Plural Keywords in Jane Austen’s Persuasion
Highlights
Over the past decade, there have been an increasing number of corpus stylistic studies that investigate the ways in which language is used to create meanings and effects in literary texts through reliance on a corpus, i.e., a large collection of electronic texts sampled to be maximally representative of a particular language or language variety (McEnery and Hardie 2012)
While there have been quite a number of corpus stylistic studies that draw on keywords, almost all of them pay attention to the semantics of keywords and the way this relates to different aspects of the literary texts under study, for example, thematic meanings and fictional world (e.g., Mahlberg and McIntyre 2011), characterisation (e.g., Culpeper 2014a, 2014b; Jaafar 2017) and cohesion (e.g., Mastropierro and Mahlberg 2017)
The present study approaches keywords in a literary text in a way that is different from other corpus stylistic studies
Summary
There have been an increasing number of corpus stylistic studies that investigate the ways in which language is used to create meanings and effects in literary texts through reliance on a corpus, i.e., a large collection of electronic texts sampled to be maximally representative of a particular language or language variety (McEnery and Hardie 2012). While there have been quite a number of corpus stylistic studies that draw on keywords, almost all of them pay attention to the semantics of keywords and the way this relates to different aspects of the literary texts under study, for example, thematic meanings and fictional world (e.g., Mahlberg and McIntyre 2011), characterisation (e.g., Culpeper 2014a, 2014b; Jaafar 2017) and cohesion (e.g., Mastropierro and Mahlberg 2017) To illustrate this practice with corpus stylistic work on Jane Austen novels, Starcke (2009), for example, approaches keywords in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by categorising and grouping them in light of their semantic relationships with one another, such as mental concepts and emotion, women and family relationships. Collocates of a node word/phrase can be extracted manually from an examination of concordance lines
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