I posted the following query some weeks ago. I am now posting a brief
summary of responses.
First, here is a reminder of the original query:
> Dear All,
>
> I have a query about work done on the interface of stylistics and corpus
> linguistics, and would be grateful if anyone could provide any thoughts or
> pointers to work in this area.
>
> What I am thinking of is principally linguistic studies of
> literature which
> make use of corpora or corpus linguistics techniques.
>
> Examples of this would be:
> - studies which have compared a given feature in a literary text with its
> usage in a reference corpus, possibly to identify and/or quantify
> deviation
> from non-literary norms;
> - adding annotation of linguistic categories in electronic literary texts;
> - construction of corpora of literary texts.
>
> I am arbitrarily excluding:
> - stylometry and authorship studies
> - literary concordances (which don't do any more than that)
> - linguistic studies of a literary text which happen to have used an
> electronic text or computational techniques, but not a corpus or anything
> normally understood as a corpus linguistic technique.
And here is my summary of the responses. Thanks to all those who responded.
Several of you mentioned the work of Mike Stubbs, who does some keywords
analysis of short stories in Words and Phrases (2001), and who has recently
given lectures analysing Heart of Darkness with reference to corpora. This
work will be published in Language and Literature, 14, 1 (2005), entitled
'Conrad in the Computer: Examples of Quantitative Stylistic Methods'. A
paper based on this will also be published next year in "Rethinking English:
Reconciling Literature, Linguistics and Cultural Studies", edited by Andrea
Gerbig and Anja Müller-Wood, and which promises to contain several other
interesting articles.
The work of Bill Louw was cited by several people, though no specific
references were given. I can think of:
Louw, B. (1993) "Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer? The
Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosodies", in Baker, M., Francis, G. and
E. Tognini- Bonelli (eds) (1993) Text and Technology: In Honour of John
Sinclair. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 157-176.
Bill gave a very stimulating talk on this topic at TALC a few weeks ago, in
which he argued that the study of collocations is the instrument that can
make stylistics into a science
(http://www.ugr.es/~talc6/talc_search/proceedings/plen3.html).
John Sinclair also mentioned a pre-computer corpus analysis in Josephine
Miles' "Eras and Modes in English Poetry" (1964). I believe he has a
relevant paper analysing Pope, forthcoming in the proceedings of the PALA
2003 conference, edited by Isil Bas.
I'd also like to add the forthcoming 'Corpus Stylistics' by Elena Semino and
Mick Short in the series Routledge Studies in Corpus Linguistics. This will
bring together the work done in Lancaster on annotating a corpus for speech,
thought and writing presentation.
Also not mentioned by anyone else was the recent work of Michael Hoey on
lexical priming, which he talked about in connection to the analysis of
literature in the recent Fourth Annual Sinclair Open Lecture in Birmingham,
where he also informed us that he had finished a book on the topic.
So it looks like there will soon be lots more interesting work published in
this area.
Other articles which were suggested included:
Malrieu D. 2002a. Stylistique et statistique textuelle. À partir d'un
article de C. Muller sur les pronoms de personnes. Actes JADT 2002,
available (in French) at
http://www.revue-texto.net/Inedits/Malrieu_Stylistique.pdf.
Krishnamurthy, R. (1995) The Macrocosm and the Microcosm: The Corpus and The
Text
pp 1-16, Linguistic Approaches to Literature: Papers in Literary Stylistics
ed J. Payne, Discourse Analysis Monograph 17
ELR, University of Birmingham, UK; ISBN 0-7044-1581-X
A Corpus-Based Study of Lexical Items in Five Screenplays In Comparison with
a Spoken and a Written Corpus by Xiaofen Wang-Gempp at
http://chss.montclair.edu/~sotillos/Julie'sResearch1.html.
Adam Kilgariff drew attention to the fact that most work at this interface
does in fact take authorhsip as its topic, and mentioned the work of Fiona
Tweedie and Harald Baayen.
Chris Tribble pointed me towards a forthcoming paper of his which includes a
keywords study of two romantic fiction texts from the BNC:
Tribble, C. (forthcoming) "The text, the whole text... or why large
published corpora aren't much use to lan-guage learners and teachers" in
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B., (ed.) Practical Applications In Language
Cor-pora (PALC 2003) Hamburg: Peter Lang.
__
Martin Wynne
Head of the Oxford Text Archive and
AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics
Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road
Oxford
UK - OX2 6NN
Tel: +44 1865 283299
Fax: +44 1865 273275
martin.wynne@ota.ahds.ac.uk
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