Impenetrable Eyes, Stealth and Surveillance: A Corpus Stylistic Study of Salient Adjectives in William Faulkner’s The Hamlet

William Collins

doi:10.22158/sll.v5n4p94

Abstract

Stylistics combines both a granular and global approach to works of literature. Through analysis of linguistic and semantic patterns in a text, stylistics explores how authors construct a fictional text world and populate it with vividly realized characters. In this article, I adopt a corpus-stylistic approach to William Faulkner’s The Hamlet. Through identification of high-frequency words and close reading of their concordances, I explore what the data reveals about Faulkner’s thematic concerns in the novel and how his linguistic strategies convey them to the reader.

Highlights

Corpus stylistics allows researchers to conduct quantitative analysis of literary texts, compile frequency lists of keywords, parts of speech and semantic fields, and compare the target text against a large database of imaginative literature to determine the relative overuse of key language
At the outset of this study a blended approach to exploring William Faulkner’s thematic and character-development in The Hamlet was proposed, an approach combining quantitative data compiled by the online corpus-analysis program Wmatrix, and close reading of sets of concordance lines
The research questions were (1) What can quantitative corpus analysis of William Faulkner’s “The Hamlet” tell us about keywords and parts-of-speech in the novel? and (2) What can close reading of concordance-lines for statistically-overused adjectives tell us about the thematic concerns of the novel and Faulkner’s linguistic strategies for developing them? The target corpus consisted of the complete novel while the reference corpus was the BNC Written Imaginative sampler