A Corpus Stylistic Study of Singular and Plural Keywords in Jane Austen’s Persuasion
Main Article Content
Abstract
While many corpus stylistic studies that draw on keywords pay attention to meanings of the lexical items, the present study focuses on their grammatical forms and argues that the forms largely account for the significance of keywords of a text and their contributions to meanings in a literary text. The nouns “years” and “man”, which were found to be statistically significant in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, were studied in terms of their co-occurrence patterns and textual functions. Concordance lines of these two words were analysed in comparison with their singular and plural non-key counterparts. The analysis reveals that the singular and plural forms of the keywords play an important role in the construction of thematic meanings and narrative techniques in the novel. It is suggested that an examination of grammatical aspects of keywords can provide contributions not only to literary studies of a novel but also to corpus stylistic methods and to theoretical linguistic arguments on word meanings.
Article Details
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
Austen, J. 1817. Persuasion. London: Pan Books Ltd.
Culpeper, J. 2014a. Keywords and characterization: An analysis of six characters in Romeo and Juliet. In Digital literary studies: Corpus approaches to poetry, prose and drama, eds. D. Hoover, J. Culpeper and K. O’Halloran, 9–34. London: Routledge.
_______. 2014b. Developing keyness and characterization: Annotation. In Digital literary studies: Corpus approaches to poetry, prose and drama, eds. D. Hoover, J. Culpeper and K. O’Halloran, 35–63. London: Routledge.
Enkvist, N. 1973. Linguistic stylistics. The Hague: Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111348926
Groom, N. 2010. Closed-class keywords and corpus-driven discourse analysis. In Keyness in Texts, eds. M. Bondi and M. Scott, 59–78. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.41.05gro
Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C. 2004. An introduction to functional grammar. Oxon: Hodder Education.
Hanks, P. 2000. Do word meanings exist? Computers and the Humanities 34: 205–15. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1002471322828
Hunston, S. and Francis, G. 2000. Pattern grammar: A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.4
Jaafar, E. 2017. Corpus stylistic analysis of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs. Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 20(1): 25–42.
Jenkyns, R. 2004. A fine brush on ivory: An appreciation of Jane Austen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jordan, E. 2007. Introduction. In Persuasion, J. Austen, VII–XV. London: Wordsworth Classics. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155807078028
Kirkham, M. 1997. Jane Austen, feminism and fiction. Exeter: Short Run Press.
Louw, W. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair, eds. M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli, 157–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.64.11lou
Mahlberg, M. 2005. English general nouns: A corpus theoretical approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.20
Mahlberg, M. and McIntyre, D. 2011. A case for corpus stylistics: Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. English Text Construction 4(2): 204–227.
Mastropierro, L. and Mahlberg, M. 2017. Key words and translated cohesion in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and one of its Italian translations. English Text Construction 10(1): 78–105. https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.10.1.05mas
McEnery, A. and Hardie, A. 2012. Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McMaster, J. 1995. Jane Austen the novelist. London: Palgrave McMillan.
_______. 1997. Class. In The Cambridge companion to Jane Austen, eds. E. Copeland and J. McMaster, 115–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521495172.007
Page, N. 1972. The language of Jane Austen. Bristol: Basil Blackwell.
Partington, A. 2004. Patterns and meanings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rayson, P. 2003. Matrix: A statistical method and software tool for linguistic analysis through corpus comparison. PhD dissertation, Lancaster University, United Kingdom.
R?mer, U. and Schulze, R. 2009. Exploring the lexis–grammar interface. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.35
Scott, M. and Tribble, C. 2006. Textual patterns: Key words and corpus analysis in language education. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.22
Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
_______. 2003. Reading concordances. London: Longman.
_______. 2004. Trust the text: Language, corpus and discourse. London: Routledge.
Starcke, B. 2006. The phraseology of Jane Austen’s Persuasion: Phraseological units as carriers of meaning. ICAME Journal 30: 87–104.
_______. 2009. Keywords and frequent phrases of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: A corpus-stylistic analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14(4): 492– 523. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.14.4.03fis
Stubbs, M. 2002. Words and phrases. Oxford: Blackwell.
_______. 2005. Conrad in the computer: Examples of quantitative stylistic methods. Language and Literature 14(1): 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947005048873
Stewart, D. 2010. Semantic prosody: A critical evaluation. Oxon: Routledge.
Todd, J. 2015. Cambridge introduction to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316178591
Whitsitt, S. 2005. A critique of the concept of semantic prosody. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10(3): 283–305. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.10.3.01whi
Wijitsopon, R. 2013. A corpus-based study of the style in Jane Austen’s novels. Manusya: Journal of Humanities 16(1): 41–64.