Keywords and frequent phrases of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Abstract

Corpus linguistic analyses reveal meanings and structural features of data, that cannot be detected intuitively. This has been amply demonstrated with regard to non-fiction data, but fiction texts have only rarely been analysed by corpus linguistic techniques. This is the case even though it has been shown by previous analyses that corpus stylistic analyses reveal literary meanings of the data that are left undetected by the intuitive analyses of literary criticism. The analysis of the keywords and most frequent phrases of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice presented in this article confirms this claim by uncovering meanings that are not discussed in literary critical secondary sources. This constitutes evidence for the large potential of corpus stylistics for the analysis of literature and its meanings.