A Small-Corpus-Based Approach to Alice's Roles

Abstract

This paper is a case study for examining how a small-corpus-based approach can contribute to research in stylistics. Specifically, we have built small corpora of the two Alice books and retrieved, using WordSmith Tools suite, first, verbs of saying and their adverbials to elucidate how Alice speaks to others in the stories, and secondly; modifiers of'Alice' to get the images of the main character. An analysis of these data reveals that Alice's role in each book is quite distinct: an unexpected visitor thrown into the passive state in Wonderland and an active explorer in Looking-Glass. These findings objectively serve to reinforce our argument over what Alice is called through the perusal of the texts. Alice's roles in the two books are thus interactively supported by the small-corpus-based approach and the non-corpus-based approach, which may explore the validity of the interfaced approach, the collaborative work of quantitative processing and qualitative speculation.