The potentialities of corpus-based techniques for analyzing literature

Authors

  • Khalid Shakir Hussein Thi-Qar University, College of Education, English Department, Iraq

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25255/2378.3591.2020.1.2.28.43

Keywords:

Corpus Stylistics, Collocate Lists analysis, Dispersion Plots Analysis, Keyword Lists Analysis, Collocate Lists Analysis, Frequency Lists analysis

Abstract

This paper presents an attempt to explore the analytical potential of five corpus-based techniques: concordances, frequency lists, keyword lists, collocate lists, and dispersion plots. The basic question addressed is related to the contribution that these techniques make to gain more objective and insightful knowledge of the way literary meanings are encoded and of the way the literary language is organized. Three sizable English novels (Joyc's Ulysses, Woolf's The Waves, and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying) are laid to corpus linguistic analysis. It is only by virtue of corpus-based techniques that huge amounts of literary data are analyzable. Otherwise, the data will keep on to be not more than several lines of poetry or short excerpts of narrative. The corpus-based techniques presented throughout this paper contribute more or less to a sort of rigorous interpretation of literary texts far from the intuitive approaches usually utilized in traditional stylistics.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Sampson, G. (1980). Schools of Linguistics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Pezik, P. Computational and Corpus Linguistics. Retrieved from http://www.pezik.pl/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/new-ways.pdf (23 July 2013).

Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Francis, W. & Kucera, H. (1982). Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and grammar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Scott, M. (2010). WordSmith Tools (Version 5.0). [Computer software]. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.

Evison, J. (2010). "What are the basics of analysing a corpus?" In O'keefe, A. & McCarthy, M. (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. London and New York: Routledge Books.

Baker, P., Hardie, A., & McEnery, T. (2006). A Glossary of Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Halliday, M. (2004). "Lexicology". In Halliday, M. (ed.) Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics. London: Continuum.

Mukherjee, J. (2005). Stylistics, in P.Strazny (ed.), Encyclopedia of Linguistics. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, pp. 1184-6.

Biber D., Conrad S. & Cortes V. (2004).' "Take a look At . . .": Lexical Bundles in University Teaching and Textbooks'. Applied Linguistics. (2004) 25 (3): 401-35.

Kennedy, G. (1998). An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. London: Longman.

Faulkner, W. (1995). As I lay Dying. Retrieved from (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/) (17 July 2013).

Joyce, J. (1990). Ulysses. Retrieved from (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/) (01 July 2013).

Woolf, V. (1985). The Waves. Retrieved from (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/) (09 July 2013).

Downloads

Published

2020-04-01