O'Halloran, K.A. (2007) 'Corpus-assisted literary evaluation', Corpora, 2 (1): 33-63. (original) (raw)

Corpus-assisted literary evaluation

Corpora, 2007

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.

Literary Theory, Stylistics and Cognitive Poetics

Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021

The desire to understand and interpret the underlying mechanisms involved in the creation and reception of literary texts, and the influence of these mechanisms on human cognition goes back at least to Aristotle's Poetics. However, the last century has witnessed a vast variety of approaches to the understanding of literature: a plethora of theories such as feminist, post colonialist, queer and reader response theories as well as some practical ways of analysis and interpretation such as formalism, new criticism, stylistics, cognitive poetics have shown themselves at the opposite end of the continuum. Stylistics and its evolved form, cognitive poetics have been significantly influential in the understanding of the processes involved in the creation and reception of literature. Although stylistics and cognitive poetics have usually been covered under the broad heading of literary theory, it has been observed that the divergence in the ways they operate makes such claims invalid because, unlike theory, empirical evidence is at the heart of stylistics and cognitive poetics. This paper aims to provide an overview of stylistics, and cognitive poetics and illustrate how they differ from literary theory.

Style in Literature: A Stylistics Study of a Poem

2017

This paper attempts a stylistic study of a poem. It targets to unveil the deeper underpinnings of semanticity in condensed literary pieces, particularly in poetry, as a consequence of the style employed by an author. Among other findings, the study uncovered the peculiar use of lexis and the features embedded in such peculiar use. It brings to the fore, the heavy use of deviation and parallelism in drumming home the theme of the poem. And finally, a fundamental literary feature used which is worthy of note and which the study has clearly drawn attention to in the analysis, is the foregrounding of the entire literary piece, which gives it a unique outlook. On the surface, one might not notice the effect of this literary technique but the study has meticulously pointed this out. Article visualizations:

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.

Re-reading the script: a discursive appraisal of the use of the ‘schema’ in cognitive poetics

This paper argues that what at first sight appear to be claims about the minds of readers can often be better understood as arguments about the qualities of texts. It is both a critique of schema theory as applied to literary analysis and a study in the rhetoric of literary evaluation. Two literary readings that employ schema theory are analysed: Sara Mills's reading of Martin Amis's novel, London Fields, and Guy Cook's reading of Edward Bond's poem, 'First World War Poets'. It is argued that the rhetorical effectiveness of these writings is largely independent of the validity or otherwise of schema theory. This paper can be downloaded free of charge: http://oro.open.ac.uk/15336/1/Allington\_2005.pdf

Literary stylistics, authorial intention and the scientific study of literature: A critical overview

Language and Literature, 2018

A tendency by literary stylisticians to overlook the role of the author in the generation of literary meaning has been a significant source of tension between linguistic approaches to literariness and other practices in the discipline, such as text-editing and literary biography. Recently, however, efforts have been made to close this gap, with a branch of stylistics, cognitive poetics, claiming to have developed a new and empirical method of integrating an appreciation of authorial imagination and creativity into the study of readers’ responses to the language of literary texts. We examine these claims critically, testing the grounds of assertions about scientific rigour in relation to demands about model testing and falsifiability associated with the scientific study of literature more generally. We then explore how some other methodologies, technologies and insights associated with this last branch of the discipline might be brought to bear on the topic of authorial intention, wi...

The Transitivity Analysis of Woolf's 'Kew Gardens': A Corpus Based Study

Um-e- Ammara, 2019

The current study was based on the theory of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (2014), which seeks language and its grammar as a meaning-making resource. Halliday (2014) distinguished three metafunctions, one of them is the ideational function which further involved transitivity system. Transitivity is specifically known as one of the methods of clause analysis which involved three components; participant, process, and circumstance. The research was confined to analyse the participants, process with their sub-types, and circumstances that occur in the clauses as well as to determine the dominant elements of transitivity. The purpose of the research was to explore the ideational or experiential meanings and it was delimited to corpus-based transitivity analysis to unfold human experiences and world view of personas in the narrative text of 'Kew Gardens' (1919; 1921) by Virginia Woolf. The study aimed to explore the literary style of narrative text written in stream of consciousness (SOC) technique by Woolf. Moreover, the research was based on corpus-based methodology. Quantitative data included the statistics, frequencies and percentages while qualitative data involved the interpretation of the results and facts. Corpus collection included the narrative fiction 'Kew Gardens'. The analysis was conducted with the use of UAM corpus tool developed by O'Donnell (2009). The text file was first incorporated and then analysed through the tool by creating the annotation layer. The tool represented the statistics after annotation of the text. The total number of segments was 1214, words in segment were 7680, and tokens in segment were 8408. The result of analysis was quite significant. The research will be substantial for stylisticians and language researchers to analyse and interpret literary styles of different genres in literature.

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.

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.