EXISTENCE, EXPECTATION, AND INTERFERENCE: A CORPUS STYLISTICS STUDY OF WORD CLUSTERS IN JANE AUSTEN’S WORKS
Keywords:
Corpus Stylistics, Jane Austen, Thematic Analysis, Word Clusters
Abstract
The study examines the thematic and stylistic elements in Jane Austen’s novels by examining the word clusters. The computational analysis using AntConc concordance software focuses on finding the recurring bi-grams and tri-grams that potentially explain Austen’s narrative style. The finding of the study suggests that word clusters like “to be”, “it would be,” and “could not be” are key features in Austen’s narrative technique to portray the existence, expectations, and interference women encountered within patriarchal society during the era. This corpus stylistics approach helps confirm the significance of Austen’s writings in understanding the societal construct in the era and provides quantitative evidence to support traditional literary analysis.
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Burrows, J. (2002). ‘Delta’: A measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 17(3), 267–287. https://doi.org/10.1093/LLC/17.3.267
Demmen, J. E. J. (2012). A corpus stylistic investigation of the language style of Shakespeare’s plays in the context of other contemporaneous plays (Issue September). Lancaster University.
Fischer-Starcke, B. (2009). Keywords and frequent phrases of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(4), 492–523. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.14.4.03fis
Flavin, L. (2004). Jane Austen in the classroom: Viewing the novel/reading the film. Peter Lang. Publishing, Inc.
Hoover, D. L. (2007). Corpus stylistics, stylometry, and the styles of Henry James. Style, 41(2), 174–203. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.41.2.174
Hung, M., Chen, H.-Y., Chang, Y.-Y., Hung, W.-T., & Tsoi, C.-H. (2020). A corpus-based analysis of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (IJLLT), 3(11), 117–123. https://doi.org/10.32996/ijllt
Jockers, M. L. (2013). Macroanalysis: Digital methods and literary history. University of Illinois Press.
Johnson, C. L. (1995). Jane Austen: Women, politics, and the novel. University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, C. L. (2014). Jane Austen’s cults and cultures. University of Chicago Press.
Kaplan, L. (2005). Persuasions 27. The Jane Austen Journal.
Mahlberg, M. (2013). Corpus stylistics and Dickens’s fiction. Routledge.
Makhloof, S. (2020). Leech and short’s checklist of lexical features in style in fiction: A theoretical analysis. IJOHMN (International Journal Online of Humanities), 6(4), 19–43. https://doi.org/10.24113/ijohmn.v6i4.189
McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.
McIntyre, D., & Walker, B. (2019). Corpus stylistics theory ad practic. Edinburgh University Press Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367568887-27
Moretti, F. (2013). Distant reading. Verso.
Murphy, S. (2006). Now I am alone: A corpus stylistic approach to Shakespearian soliloquies. Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics & Language Teaching, 1, 66–85. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/laelpgconference/papers/v01/Murphy.pdf
O’Halloran, K. (2007). Critical Discourse Analysis and the Corpus-informed Interpretation of Metaphor at the Register Level. Applied Linguistics, 28(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/aml046
Oakes, M. P., & Ji, M. (Eds.). (2012). Quantitative methods in corpus-based translation studies: A practical guide to descriptive translation research (Vol. 51). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/SCL.51
Rybicki, J., Eder, M., & Hoover, D. L. (2016). Computational stylistics and text analysis. In C. Crompton, R. Lane, & R. Siemens (Eds.), Doing digital humanities (p. 22). Routledge.
Scott, M. (2008). WordSmith tools version 5.0: User manual. Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, J. (2004). Trust the text: Language, corpus, and discourse. Routledge.
Stubbs, M. (2005). Conrad in the computer : examples of quantitative stylistics methods. Language and Literature, 14(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947005048873
Tannen, D. (1996). Gender and discourse. Oxford University Press. https://www.deborahtannen.com/gender-and-discourse
Underwood, T. (2019). Distant horizons digital evidence and literary change. The University of Chicago Press.
Wiltshire, J. (1992). Jane Austen and the body: “The picture of health.” Cambridge University Press.
