The Potentialities of Corpus-Based Techniques for Analyzing Literature

• Published in: Journal of Al-Qadisiya for Humanities Sciences 2019, Vol.22 (2), p.7-20
• Main Author: Al Sheerify, Khalid Shakir Hussein
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: التقنيات الحديثة; الخطاب السردي; الروايات; الروايات الإنجليزية; النقد الأدبي; لسانيات النص
• ISSN: 1991-7805; 2520-3541

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. All are packed in WordSmith Tools Version5.0 which is the basic quantitative program that is utilized throughout this paper. 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. How far can corpus linguistics provide researchers with quantitative techniques that help them figuring out the cyclic relation between corpus-stylistics and literary description. Three sizable English novels (Joyc's Ulysses, Woolf's The Waves, and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying) are laid to corpus linguistic analysis. These novels are quite controversial and heatedly debated by critics for their exceptional forms and contents. 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. Certain intuitive critical judgments about the three novels are undertaken and then checked and verified by the five techniques. It is the objective contribution of corpus linguistic description that verifies or falsifies the traditional ways of literary appreciation.