Corpus Approaches to the Language of Literature (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review - Dan McIntyre and Brian Walker, Corpus Stylistics. Theory and Practice
Iperstoria. Journal of American and English Studies, 2020
n 2007, Michaela Mahlberg entitled her contribution to Text, Discourse and Corpora "Corpus stylistics: Bridging the Gap Between Linguistic and Literary Studies" (Hoey, Mahlberg et al., 2007, 219): the volume by McIntyre and Walker provides an insightful explanation of how such gap can be bridged. Defining in detail the scope and applications of the multi-purposed discipline of corpus stylistics, the authors stress major aspects of interest for experts and novices alike, offering a large number of practical examples together with an accurate theoretical background.
2021
This timely work in a relatively new field should be useful to researchers experienced in both stylistics and corpus linguistics, despite being explicitly aimed at stylisticians. In addition to demonstrating the usefulness of incorporating corpus methods into stylistic enquiry, there is much to convince corpus linguists that applying their usual toolkit to stylistics is itself a worthwhile pursuit. The book would be worth recommending to students as a helpful introduction to the area of corpus stylistics. In delineating its scope, Corpus Stylistics provides clear introductions to key concepts and methodological processes, especially those in corpus linguistics. The book begins by asking 'what is corpus stylistics?', and returns regularly to questions of definition and delineation in subsequent chapters, while demonstrating applications with both fiction and non-fiction texts. In the final chapter, the authors revisit the problem of definition, and conclude that corpus stylistics best describes "a particular focus of corpus linguistics" which is concerned with "issues of style" (p. 315). That corpus stylistics is described as a focus of corpus linguistics, rather than as one way of doing stylistics, did surprise me somewhat, as it might alienate some stylisticians. Perhaps the stylistics 'credentials' of the authors, and the way this definition was carefully woven from previous theory and analysis, might soften the blow and justify the apparent primacy given to corpus linguistics. This 'bookend' structure neatly frames the book and its central concerns with a depth and scope which reflect the authors' expertise, and helps to establish corpus stylistics as a field separate from related applications of corpus linguistics, such as corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), for instance. The structure of the chapters makes the book especially useful and helps to prevent overwhelming the newcomer to corpus methods. Important theoretical and methodological concepts are sprinkled across chapters as appropriate, thus avoiding beginning the book with a concentration of material new to stylisticians, which might potentially dishearten the reader. So, for example, introductions to best practice in building and annotating corpora, sampling and ethics, the concepts of keyness and collocation, and the use of corpora to test hypotheses, are dealt with in chapters 2 to 4, as they arise. Later chapters focus on specific contexts or text types of stylistic interest, e.g. classroom or historical texts. The case studies found in most chapters have been well chosen to illustrate the specific aspect in focus or to concretise the theoretical or methodological choices. One might expect these case studies to be based on fictional texts, and they frequently are, but
Corpus stylistics and translation
In questo articolo, Jane Helen Johnson fornisce un panorama generale sui metodi della Linguistica dei Corpora applicati anche allo studio della stilistica letteraria, con l'obiettivo di verificare la loro utilità anche nella traduzione letteraria. A questo scopo fa riferimento a numerose ricerche già svolte nell'ambito di stilometria e stilistica dei corpora, dagli studi di Stubbs (2005) sul lessico 'vago' di Heart of Darkness di Conrad a quello di Semino e Short (2004), che utilizzano un approccio 'corpus-based' per valutare l'applicabilità del modello di rappresentazione del discorso parlato e del pensiero (Leech e Short, 1981), concepito con riferimento al genere 'narrativa', ad altri generi di discorso scritto. In particolare, descrive lo studio di Mahlberg (2007), che utilizza un approccio di stilistica dei corpora per esaminare le funzioni testuali locali come elementi stilistici nella narrativa di Charles Dickens ed in Bleak House in partic...
A Rough Guide to Doing Corpus Stylistics
Matraga, 2013
This article has two main purposes. The first is to provide a short panorama of existing trends within computer-assisted stylistics. The second is to analyse a prize winning novel by English writer Julian Barnes, by resorting to the tenets and working tools of one of the newest branch of Stylistics, the so-called Corpus stylistics. To this end, the article starts by looking at various attempts at defining what style is and their implications to the definition of the discipline known as Stylistics. Then the paper presents recent work within the field of Corpus stylistics, as it describes the uses of computational tools as part of the stylistician tool kit. Finally, the paper provides a variety of ways with which a literary work may be approached digitally with a view to showing how computational tools can aid the stylistician in acts of interpretation.
Stylistics and Linguistic Analyses of Literary Works
2019
A linguistic analysis of literature has caused debates among linguists and between linguists and literary critics. The debate among linguists occurs because they have different opinions regarding the nature of literary language, while the debate between linguists and literary scholars arises as literary scholars question the authority of linguistics to study literary writings. Therefore, in this paper I argue that the language of literature is similar to that of non-literary texts, and I also believe that because the centrality of language in literary writings, linguistics, as the study of language, has the authority to study literature. One linguistic approach to literature is stylistics, which studies the forms, functions, and meanings of literary language in a detailed and systematic way.
Corpus Stylistics as Contextual Prosodic Theory and Subtext by Bill Louw, Marija Milojkovic
Style, 2017
The term corpus stylistics, usually regarded as a near-synonym for stylometry, stylometrics, statistical stylistics, or stylogenetics, is closely related to statistics and corpus linguistics. Despite an increasing number of studies in the field, people still do not attain a clear line of demarcation between corpus linguistics and corpus stylistics. Corpus linguists are typically concerned with "repeated occurrences, generalizations and the description of typical patterns," while corpus stylistic studies relate to "deviations from linguistic norms that account for the artistic effects of a particular text" (Mahlberg, "Corpus Stylistic Perspective" 19). However, more needs to be known about what new perspectives corpus linguistics can offer to the depiction of stylistic devices and the interpretation of stylistic values. Under these circumstances, Bill Louw and Marija Milojkovic's Corpus Stylistics as Contextual Prosodic Theory and Subtext is instructive and worthy of reading, for it offers valuable perspectives for interdisciplinary investigations. This volume comprises two parts: the first part (Chapters 1-6) is devoted to the theoretical construction of Contextual Prosodic Theory (CPT), and the second part (Chapters 7-12) applies CPT to literary criticism, translation studies, and foreign language teaching. Chapter 1 revisits the proposal on "language and literature integration" in foreign language teaching. Louw dissolves the doubts from language teachers about "integration" by sufficiently discussing lexical syllabus design and progressive delexicalization. Having critically reviewed different theoretical perspectives on collocation, the authors argue in B o o k R e v i e w s
Corpus Stylistics as Contextual Prosodic Theory and Subtext
Linguistic approaches to literature, 2016
The term corpus stylistics, usually regarded as a near-synonym for stylometry, stylometrics, statistical stylistics, or stylogenetics, is closely related to statistics and corpus linguistics. Despite an increasing number of studies in the field, people still do not attain a clear line of demarcation between corpus linguistics and corpus stylistics. Corpus linguists are typically concerned with "repeated occurrences, generalizations and the description of typical patterns," while corpus stylistic studies relate to "deviations from linguistic norms that account for the artistic effects of a particular text" (Mahlberg, "Corpus Stylistic Perspective" 19). However, more needs to be known about what new perspectives corpus linguistics can offer to the depiction of stylistic devices and the interpretation of stylistic values. Under these circumstances, Bill Louw and Marija Milojkovic's Corpus Stylistics as Contextual Prosodic Theory and Subtext is instructive and worthy of reading, for it offers valuable perspectives for interdisciplinary investigations. This volume comprises two parts: the first part (Chapters 1-6) is devoted to the theoretical construction of Contextual Prosodic Theory (CPT), and the second part (Chapters 7-12) applies CPT to literary criticism, translation studies, and foreign language teaching. Chapter 1 revisits the proposal on "language and literature integration" in foreign language teaching. Louw dissolves the doubts from language teachers about "integration" by sufficiently discussing lexical syllabus design and progressive delexicalization. Having critically reviewed different theoretical perspectives on collocation, the authors argue in B o o k R e v i e w s
O'Halloran, K.A. (2007) 'Corpus-assisted literary evaluation', Corpora, 2 (1): 33-63.
Fleur Adcock’s poem, Street Song, is evaluated by the stylistician, Roger Fowler, as ‘dynamic and disturbing’. I agree with his literary evaluation. These unsettling effects take place in initial response to the poem, effects which draw me into the work. In other words, they are experienced before proper reflection and analysis of the poem and individual interpretation of it. Implicit within Fowler’s evaluation is that this is likely to apply for readers generally. The purpose of this article is to show how empirical corpus evidence can usefully provide substantiation of such initial evaluations of literary works, showing whether or not they are likely to be stereotypically experienced by readers. In drawing on both schema theory and corpus analysis to achieve this, the article makes links between cognitive stylistic and corpus stylistic foci.
13-17 Stylistics in language and literature.pdf
VEDA PUBLICATIONS, 2018
Language as we all know is an important or should I say an indispensable tool for human communication as it is through language that knowledge is transferred, meaning is created and understood ensuring social as well as scientific development of human society. It’s true not only for speech but also in writing, both being two of the most potential uses of language. After becoming a university subject in 1960s English language has being the target of literary critics. They have accused the linguists for being too dry when it comes to analysis of a piece of writing. And the linguists have accused the literary scholars for being to subjective, imaginative unambiguous for the same task. To bridge the differences or the gap between the two, stylistics a branch of applied linguistics functions to analyse the use of language literary texts. However it's not limited to the study of literature alone but is also stretched to varieties of writings like texts related to media and journalism, the advertisements etc. This paper is an attempt to explore the link between language and its most creative use that is Literature. Through this paper I aim to show the features of language and creative uses under which these forms are put to appeal to human senses and make a piece of literature alive whether it's romance, tragedy or comedy.