Corpus Stylistics Research Articles

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

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.

Keyness

This paper explores keywords, key part-of-speech categories and key semantic categories and their role in text analysis. The first part of the paper addresses a set of issues relating to the definition of keywords and their history, the settings used in deriving keywords, the choice of reference corpora, the different kinds of keyword that emerge in one’s results and the dispersion of keywords in one’s data. It argues, amongst other things, that keywords are the same as style markers, and that three types of keyword can be identified: interpersonal, textual and ideational. The second part of the paper addresses the question of what precisely is to be gained from analysing key part-of-speech or key semantic domains in addition to keywords. It shows that whilst in general they add little to a keyword analysis, which is in any case methodologically more robust, there are some significant specific benefits. Answers to many of the questions posed in this paper are illustrated by a study of character-talk from Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, and in this way this paper also makes a contribution to the fledging field of corpus stylistics.

Corpus stylistics in translation studies: two modern Chinese translations of Don Quijote

This article aims to provide a quantitative account of the stylistic differences between two modern Chinese translations of Don Quijote in terms of the use of language archaism. For this purpose, a number of statistical techniques applicable in corpus linguistics have been used, which exemplifies the foregrounding of quantitative primary data. The article provides an original interdisciplinary study which attempts to integrate research methods adapted from different areas of research, e.g. textual statistics, corpus linguistics, literary stylistics and translation studies, into the development of an emerging field known as corpus stylistics.

Narrative Progression in the Short Story: First Steps in a Corpus Stylistic Approach

I am interested in the putative textual signalings of narrative progression, and thereafter the reader expectations that these foster; I am trying to identify such signalings (or narrative prospection, as it is also called) with new research methods, namely those of corpus linguistics. Research of this kind, blending a literary interest with use of corpus tools, is coming to be known as corpus stylistics (or more narrowly, corpus narratology). For readers of this journal I assume that neither explaining nor justifying an interest in narrative progression is necessary, so I will discuss this relatively briefly. I will spend a little more time outlining what corpus stylistics entails and what its limitations are; and then I will share some ways in which I have tried to make it useful in the pursuit of my research interest, the textualization of narrative prospection. Narrative prospection is itself only a stage in the experiential sequence of interest to me. I assume that the text's prospections cumulatively and serially guide the reader to expect the story currently being read to continue and terminate in one way rather than others (at the least, the prospections will foster probabilistic expectations). The ways in which the subsequent narrative text confirms or flouts

Review of Sinclair & Carter ((2004)): Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse

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Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics. * Elena Semino and Mick Short.

Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics. * Elena Semino and Mick Short.