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Michaela Mahlberg, University of Liverpool
'Ah!' said the count, drawing out the tablets again, 'ver good --fine words to begin a chapter. Chapter forty-seven. Poltics. The word poltic surprises by himself--'
There is an emerging field of linguistic study that can be described as ‘corpus stylistics’. This field, however, is not easy to delimit. Part of the difficulty is due to differing views on what ‘corpus linguistics’ is. Corpus linguistics may be seen primarily as a methodology: computer tools can count words, organise and display textual examples, and generate statistics for a variety of questions. If the theoretical framework within which the methodology is applied is regarded as fairly stable, this approach can be characterised as ‘corpus-based’. If the theoretical framework, however, is regarded as flexible and dynamic, trying to accommodate findings that emerge from the observation of corpus data, the approach can be characterised as ‘corpus-driven’ (cf. see Tognini-Bonelli 2001) and corpus linguistics becomes far more than a methodology. Corpus linguistics develops innovative descriptive tool that differ from more established linguistic categories; important examples are the lexical item (Sinclair 2004) and the pattern (Hunston & Francis 2000). Central to such corpus-driven work is the attention that is paid to the relationship between meaning and form. It is this focus that shows how corpus linguistics and literary stylistics are related. Both are interested in HOW we say what we say. The difference between the two lies in that corpus linguistics is interested in repeated occurrences, generalisations and the description of typical patterns. Literary stylistics, on the other hand, is interested in deviations from linguistic norms that account for the artistic effects of a particular text. However, if we use innovative categories to describe linguistic norms, deviations from these norms will shed new light on the way in which we analyse style in literary texts. Thus, ‘corpus stylistics’ is not simply the application of corpus linguistic methodology to the study of style. In this session will look at how descriptive tools such as collocations, clusters, lexical items, and local textual functions can be used in the analysis of literary texts. Examples will be drawn mainly from novels by Charles Dickens. We will see that Count Smorltork in the above quote from The Pickwick Papers was quite right … words can have exciting effects depending on where and in which form we find them in a text, be it at the beginning of a chapter or in collocation with other words.