Corpus Stylistics

I verify a chronology in which seven groups of passages represent consecutive phases. A proposed chronology is verified if independent markers of style vary over its phases in a smooth fashion. Four markers of style follow smooth trajectories over the seven phases: The first is average verse length. The second encompasses the 28 most common morphemes in the Qurʾān. The percentages of these morphemes in a text constitute its stylistic profile. The thus-defined stylistic profile is shown to vary in a smooth fashion over "time", i.e. over the proposed chronological sequence of phases. Third, a similar thing holds for a profile based on the frequencies of 114 other common morphemes. Fourth, similar results are obtained for a list of 3693 relatively uncommon morphemes. In addition to establishing a relative chronology in seven phases, this essay demonstrates the stylistic unity of many large passages. It also shows that the Qurʾān has one author.

This paper explores keywords, key part-of-speech categories and key semantic categories and their role in text analysis. The first part of the paper addresses a set of issues relating to the definition of keywords and their history, the settings used in deriving keywords, the choice of reference corpora, the different kinds of keyword that emerge in one's results and the dispersion of keywords in one's data. It argues, amongst other things, that keywords are the same as style markers, and that three types of keyword can be identified: interpersonal, textual and ideational. The second part of the paper addresses the question of what precisely is to be gained from analysing key part-of-speech or key semantic domains in addition to keywords. It shows that whilst in general they add little to a keyword analysis, which is in any case methodologically more robust, there are some significant specific benefits. Answers to many of the questions posed in this paper are illustrated by a study of character-talk from Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, and in this way this paper also makes a contribution to the fledging field of corpus stylistics. Keyword analysis has a relatively recent history, though it is rapidly gaining steam: for example, Tribble (2000) examines Romantic fiction, newspaper political correctness discourse, Baker (2004) gay and lesbian texts, and spoken and written discourse (see also the papers in Archer forthcoming). Mike Scott's own publications, as well as those of many other authors, can be found in Mike Scott's comprehensive bibliography available at: http://www.lexically.net/publications/publications.htm. The concept of a keyword, a word that is statistically characteristic of a text or texts, is certainly not new, having a history of at least 50 years and embryonic keyword analyses were being conducted at least 20 years ago, as section 2 of this paper will elaborate. What is notably different for more recent times is the advent of computer programs (especially Mike Scott's WordSmith Tools, 1996-2008) that perform the required analysis. It is now a relatively easy and rapid task for a researcher to calculate the incidences of each and every single word in the target data as well as a comparative data set, undertake statistical comparisons between incidences of the same words in order to establish significant differences, and finally see the resulting keywords ranked according to degrees of significance of difference. The relative ease and speed of the analytical task is also apparent when one considers other methods designed to reveal styles. Using data comprising three genres (conversation, monologic speech and academic prose), Xiao and Mcenery (2005) compared a multi-dimensional analysis of the type conducted in Biber (1988) with a keyword analysis. The results they obtained were 'similar' (2005:76) for both methodologies, but keyword analysis was 'less demanding ' (2005: 77), for the reason that multidimensional analysis first involves some relatively complex algorithms for the extraction of This si the final draft of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2009) Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character-talk of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14(1): 29-59. It may contain minor errors and infelicities. 2 certain grammatical features from the corpus, and then relatively complex statistical analysis. However, perhaps as a consequence of the ease and rapidity of keyness analysis, some studies perform a keyword analysis in a relatively mechanical way without a critical awareness of what is being revealed or how it is being revealed. The first part of this paper addresses a set of questions relating to keywords, and in so doing aims to raise that awareness. More specifically, it aims (1) to clarify and contextualize the concept of a keyword, (2) to review the role of the statistical settings and reference corpora used in deriving keywords, and to investigate keyword results, proposing that three different kinds of keyword can emerge and also briefly noting the importance of the dispersion of keywords in one's data. The second, somewhat longer, part of this paper investigates the extension of the notion of keyness to part-of-speech tags and semantic domain tags. Recent developments, most notably Paul Rayson's web-based suite of tools constituting WMatrix (Rayson 2005, forthcoming;; see also http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix), have enabled users relatively easily and rapidly to annotate their data sets for both grammatical and semantic categories, and then to identify which categories are key. Recent studies include: Jones et al. , focussing on key part-of-speech categories in a spoken corpus of English for Academic Purposes, Afida , focussing on semantic domains in business English, and Archer et al. , focussing on semantic domains in Shakespeare's plays (for further references, see http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix). The particular question this part of the paper addresses is precisely what do such studies gain from extending keyness analysis to grammatical or semantic tags. Of course, there are important methodological and theoretical debates regarding the value of annotation. Sinclair (e.g. 2004), for example, is a notable exponent of the view that we should "trust the text" and not sully it with annotations, the analyst's interpretative categories. Instead, of condemning such annotation at the outset, this paper takes a more empirical approach by examining the results of such analyses. The three analyses (keyword, key part-of-speech tag and key semantic domain tag) were repeated on the same data. Each and every resulting key item was checked manually, including all items constituting categories, in order to assess whether that item accounted for a textual pattern or style that had or had not been accounted for in the other analyses (and also, in the case of the grammatical and semantic analyses, whether that item was simply a tagging error). Rayson (2004, forthcoming) argues for conducting key part-of-speech and semantic domain analyses in addition to keyword analyses, because the former gives rise to analytical categories that (1) are fewer than keywords, thus reducing the number of categories a researcher needs to take into account, and (2) group lower frequency words which might not appear as keywords individually and could thus be overlooked. The first point is pitched as a repost to Berber Sardinha's (1999) criticism of keyword analyses, namely, that they deliver more keyword results than is possible for the researcher to analyze. However, another way of partially dealing with this problem is simply to change the keyword settings so that fewer keywords are derived (see section 3). The second point raises a more fundamental issue. However, it is not clear how much of an issue this is: how often do groups of lower frequency words which would not appear independently as keywords emerge? Rayson (forthcoming) does not display all the items that constitute the part-of-speech or semantic categories, so one cannot tell the extent to which they overlap with keywords. The second part of the paper aims at such detailed consideration and comparison of what each analysis reveals, and also suggests why differences emerge. 3

This book offers a comprehensive linguistic analysis of contemporary US television series. Adopting an interdisciplinary and multimethodological approach, Monika Bednarek brings together linguistic analysis of the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue with analysis of scriptwriting manuals, interviews with Hollywood scriptwriters, and a survey undertaken with university students about their consumption of TV series. In so doing, she presents five new and original empirical studies. The focus on language use in a professional context (the television industry), on scriptwriting pedagogy, and on learning and teaching provides an applied linguistic lens on TV series. This is complemented by perspectives taken from media linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociocultural linguistics/sociolinguistics. Throughout the book, multiple dialogue extracts are presented from a wide variety of well-known fictional television series, including The Big Bang Theory, Grey's Anatomy and Bones. Researchers in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and media linguistics will find the book both stimulating and unique in its approach.

Even forms which we consider free-standing and uncontroversially prosodic such as happen are dependent for much their prosodic power upon the fact that their subject is effectively deleted or remains latent or only potential. The proxy form and frequent collocate something almost seems to direct much of the prosodic power of happen by creating a fractured context of situation which human beings find disquieting (see Section 4 below). Note that even where forms with some* are in the object position and well away from happen their prosodic power survives. All forms that begin with some* inject into a text or situation a sinister indeterminateness which invites interrogation, inference and which drives the reader towards resolution. This can be immensely powerful in literary texts: refer to the line with which this paper concludes.

This chapter analyses characterization through television dialogue, using a corpus stylistic (Wynne 2005) approach, in particular using key word and cluster analysis . The focus is on exploring from a linguistic perspective the assumption made in Media/Television Studies that televisual characters are relatively stable, i.e. that they do not change drastically : 178, Pearson 2007. In a case study of the dramedy (comedy-drama hybrid) Gilmore Girls (Warner Brothers, 2000, I analyze the in/stability of the televisual character with respect to two main aspects: (1) How much does a character's language vary diachronically (across seasons)? (2) How much does a character's language vary according to who s/he is talking to? The corpus stylistic analysis thus explores the degree of diachronic and intersubjective stability in televisual characters. The findings are discussed in terms of characterization in the analyzed series, the nature of televisual data and narrative, the mainstream nature of TV series, and audience engagement with TV characters.

Contemporary Stylistics presents the current state of the integrated study of language and literature. From its emergence as an interdisciplinary blend of literary criticism, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, social studies and philosophy, stylistics is now a mature and vibrant single discipline, with a confident new generation of researchers engaged in the proper study of literature. This book collects some of these new voices together for the first time, and presents their latest work in a form that is accessible and placed into context. The book includes specific introductions to each piece of work by an established figure in stylistics. Taken together, the book offers a comprehensive showcase for the range of approaches and practices which form modern stylistics: from cognitive poetics to corpus linguistics, from explorations of mind style and spoken discourse in narrative to the workings of viewpoint in lyric poetry, from word meanings to the meanings and emotions of literary worlds, and more.

The language of news headlines requires that the specific meaning being
constructed is without ambiguity, and thus be clearly identifiable by the
readers. But ambiguity and meaning-making are so related that the former is,
to a varying degree, almost always present in news headlines, given a number
of linguistic and non-linguistic factors influencing the writer, reader, and the
language at hand (Hirst, 1987, Akinlotan 2018d, Eckert 2018). This study shows
(1) the extent to which ambiguity is present in online Nigerian newspaper
headlines; (2) the linguistic nature of the ambiguity, and (3) how a total of 14
linguistic predictors clearly show where we might find ambiguous headlines,
the nature of the ambiguity, and the different scenarios characterising (1) and
(2). A total of 14 predictors is investigated on the basis of over a thousand
news headlines extracted from a Nigerian national newspaper, The Punch,
showing that ambiguity has a likely incidence of 22%. Of the ambiguous
proportion, 47% is lexically-motivated while 53% is structurally motivated.
A logistic regression shows a combination of factors including animacy and
structural complexity as important predictors showing the nature and where/
when we might find (non) ambiguous news headlines.

Keywords: ambiguity, construction, Nigerian English, linguistic variable,
meaning, corpus pragmatics, news headlines

Despite a growing awareness of methodological issues, the literature on APPRAISAL has not so far provided adequate answers to some of the key challenges involved in reliably identifying and classifying evaluative language expressions. This article presents a step-wise method for the manual annotation of APPRAISAL in text that is designed to optimize reliability, replicability and transparency. The procedure consists of seven steps, from the creation of a context-specific annotation manual to the statistical analysis of the quantitative data derived from the manually-performed annotations. By presenting this method, the article pursues the twofold purpose of (i) providing a practical tool that can facilitate more reliable, replicable and transparent analyses, and (ii) fostering a discussion of the best practices that should be observed when manually annotating APPRAISAL.

In this article I explore the potential of a corpus stylistic approach to the study of literary translation. he study focuses on translation of children's literature with its speciic constrains, and illustrates with two corpus linguistic techniques: keyword and cluster analysis—speciic cases of repetition. So in a broader sense the article discusses the phenomenon of repetition in diferent literary (stylistic) traditions. hese are illustrated by examples from two children's classics aimed at two diferent age groups: the Harry Potter and the Winnie the Pooh books—and their translations into Czech. Various shits in translation, especially in the translation of children's literature, are oten explained by the operation of so-called " translation universals ". hough " repetition " as such does not belong to the commonly discussed set of translation universals, the stylistic norms opposing repetition seem to be a strong explanation for the translation shits identiied.

This thesis takes three major claims made by literary scholars about Shakespeare’s use of language regarding issues of social identity. Each chapter introduces a critical perception of Shakespeare’s language - madness (Neely 1991), whorishness (Stanton 2000, Stallybrass 1986, Newman 1986) and questions of race, ethnicity and nationality (Loomba 2000, Hall 1992) – and applies a quantitative approach to the claims they raise. In doing so, I illustrate how digital resources such as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Kay et al 2015), the Folger Digital Texts (Mowat, Werstine, Niles and Poston 2014) and corpus analysis software including AntConc (Anthony 2014) and Ubiqu+ity can be applied to a closed-set collection of plays understood to be written by Shakespeare (Wells and Taylor 1987, 109-134) to test claims laid out by literary critics. This thesis therefore shows how quantitative evidence can lead to a more complex and robust analysis of Shakespeare’s language than qualitative evidence is able to.

Until fairly recently, linguistics has been classified as a 'science' by definition, averral, and ideology rather than because of the uniformity of its practices across its many schools of thought. It is seldom the case in any discipline that a particular phenomenon begins to question that discipline's raison d'etre, withdraw the option and luxury of its often directionless and eclectic practices and proceed to force unwelcome and sweeping changes upon the discipline by beginning to dictate its method. This paper re-states its author's earlier proofs as claims that collocation as instrumentation for meaning is a scientific fact. The burden of this proof has acquired renewed urgency of an interdisciplinary nature that makes this paper both timely and necessary. The claim for collocation as science is reinforced by a number of new discoveries: the fact that all devices are brought about by relexicalisation as a marked form rather than the purported markedness that is mentalist and hence, merely averred.

The aim of this issue of is to bring together investigation into the lexicon in a variety of languages, in a diversity of manifestations – both at the word level and beyond the word level – and from a variety of perspectives, including not only those which focus on how the vocabulary is internally organized, but also those which deal with the role that lexical units and lexical relations play in the organization of other language levels, particularly in the organization of the discourse. These issues are approached from a variety of perspectives that include not only developments in several disciplines of theoretical and descriptive linguistics, particularly in lexicology, phraseology, word formation, discourse analysis, but also in diverse applied disciplines such as translation, foreign language teaching, English for specific purposes and critical discourse analysis. One of the criteria employed in the compilation of the volume was also the coverage of linguistic diversity. In total, six different languages are investigated in the studies selected in this volume: English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian. Without claiming exhaustiveness, we consider that the variety of contributions presented here offers an insight into the vigour of current corpus research into phenomena related to the lexicon. Admittedly, the full range of topics, approaches and methodologies developed in this area of research could not fit in a single volume, but a careful selection of studies representing a variety of interesting advances can be representative of significant developments taking place in the field.

Studying the stylistic aspects of literary works in fact began since the Safavid dynasty, when many biographers in Iran and in India attempted to study and criticize the poems of Iranian and Indian poets. Although biographers were more or less studying the stylistic issues from earlier periods, they were not deeply involved and mainly attempted to criticize the works. This study concerns to determine to what extent the biographers in the past have addressed and studied stylistics in its current meaning. The study has employed the stylistic approach to literary works proposed by Cyrus Shamisa in his book General Stylistics including linguistic (at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels), intellectual, and literary levels. Each biography is analyzed according to the linguistic levels. The study primarily aimed to address and study the stylistic aspects of selected biographies, from Lubab ul-Albab to Sokhan Va Sokhanvaran. These biographies were compared in terms of the three linguistic, intellectual, and literary levels. The results showed that before the contemporary period, most of these biographies had many similarities in addressing these three levels and only the contemporary biographies have paid more attention to stylistics issues. In addition, the literary level of the poems has been studied more than their intellectual level. It indicates that the figures of speech used in poems have been more important to biographies than their intellectual context.

Several tools are developed to facilitate the quantitative analysis of interpretation style, a matter that has hitherto been discussed only in vague terms. These tools can allow the investigation of questions such as: How does an interpreter divide up a source language input, to what extent does he mirror a source language speaker, and to what degree does he practise reformulation? Furthermore, an adaptive monitoring instrument is devised to facilitate the graphic representation of the linear developments of a source language discourse and its simultaneous interpretation equivalent. Not only does it allow the assessment of convergence and divergence between the two discourses, but this also permits commenting on an interpreter’s tempo by characterising the narrow and broad periodicity within his discourse, and on his composure and tribulation by describing his consistency and fluency in the discourse.

This study seeks to use corpus stylistic methods for the analysis of Jack London’s 1903 novel The Call of the Wild using some of the foremost literary criticism on the writer in order to structure this examination. Earle Labor (1994), London’s biographer and arguably the author’s most prevalent living scholar, maintains that he is the subject of ‘persistent neglect by the academic critics’ (xiii). This under-examination has partially inspired this investigation with the hope that using a more contemporary method of analysis might give a more accessible critical reading of ‘the most flamboyant literary representative of the Strenuous Age in America’ (Labor, 1994:xiii).

Before the advent of corpus linguistics and the information age, the fact that language would become its own instrumentation could not have been foreseen. This, coupled with the simultaneous realisation (largely as a result of lexicographical studies by John Sinclair in 1987 and into the nineties) that human intuition in the area of language study was unreliable, brought collocation to prominence as the major means by which 'hidden meanings might be dealt with, especially by means of semantic prosodies. The belief is gradually becoming firmer that the question of meaning can no longer be settled at first sight during the act of reading, especially where first sight refers to a reading which is 'unassisted' by data. This situation was partially predicted by philosophers like Ayer (1971: 186), who maintained that material things could exist throughout a period where none of their elements were actually experienced, pending the fulfilment of certain conditions. Corpora have made conditions more favourable for dealing with truth studies. In addition to irony and insincerity, the eight or so strands of any dictionary definition of truth can now be illustrated fairly readily through access to corpora. Conversely, space will need to be created in future dictionaries to accommodate definitions of truth which may only fully be arrived at by means of instrumentation. Collocation is now in a position to provide this. Both delexicalisation and the notion of 'local grammars are likely to reveal and define the ideological truths which inhabit specialised varieties of language, and the worlds in many of which they remain undetected and therefore, unquestioned. Because collocation is derived from the Malinowskian/Firthian tradition, larger units such as 'context of situation' may eventually become automated through collocation . Its application to large corpora will not only offer us glimpses of our own putative world, but also of its ideological variants. These worlds may then be compared with their mimetic or defamiliarised counterparts both literary and fictional. Whether the human characters that inhabit literary worlds are cold and impersonal or dependent and suffocating, their actions will march in step with the collocates that surround them, as 'persons and personalities . The degree of fracture within context of situation will create collocational profiles that reflect it. The creation of fake worlds will often depend upon the creation and acceptance of a fake collocate or collocates which the reader/hearer, because of poor intuition, attests readily, but which the corpus rejects. The language of the honest may be mobilised within a magnetic medium to 'write' the language of the deceiver, whether mere ironist or traitor. A point is fast approaching where all literary devices will benefit from being seen as collocation. Part of the approach proposed in this paper will be to provide simple proofs the reader can use both to demonstrate collocative power, and to reveal the inadequacy of mentalist alternatives such as schema theory and the cognitive 'turn' in literary studies and stylistics. The temptation to invent terminology in order to explain data will be replaced by direct access to meaning through data in ways that are even likely to discourage description which is unrelated to the central goal of instrumentation for language.

In this article we investigate keywords and key semantic domains in Fleming's Casino Royale. We identify groups of keywords that describe elements of the fictional world such as characters and settings as well as thematic signals. The keyword groups fall into two broad categories that are characterized as text-centred and reader-centred, with the latter providing particular clues for interpretation. We also compare the manually identified keyword groups with key semantic domains that are based on automatic semantic analysis. The comparison shows, for instance, how words that do not seem to fit a semantic domain can be seen as reader-centred keywords fulfilling specific textual functions. By linking our analysis to arguments in literary criticism, we show how quantitative and qualitative approaches can usefully complement one another.

According to Merriam-Webster, the act of leaving out one or more words that are not necessary for a phrase to understood a sign used in printed text to show that words have left out. Ellipsis as an index style of literary text is a challenge for literary translators since they supposed to reveal the style of original author in both form and meaning faithfully. In the article, the researcher investigated the strategies used by Persian translator to render elliptical patterns in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and their effectiveness regarding the target texts linguistic features. To this end, five categories out of Quirk's (1985) eight categories are considered for discussing. His strategy would be effective since both English and Persian have quite similarity in these features, beside this expansion would be helpful where the two languages are different. The results proved that keeping the original style as closely as feasible a few loyal translations have talked the two linguistic systems in terms of elliptical pattern. Although, Persian translator, careless to the style of the text has tended to explain the pattern and expand the text, or simply deleted the elliptical element whereby bereaving the target reader from enjoying the authors actual art.

The present study applies some of the approaches used in corpus stylistics to examine repetition in John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year and its translations into Czech and Finnish. The main aim of this case study is to explore whether systematic identification of repetitive textual features in a source language may be a beneficial procedure for translators of literary texts. The underlying assumption is that, in their complexity, not all repetitive features are necessarily easily noticeable. Repetitiveness here is identified with cluster and keyword analysis that are subsequently considered in synergy. Relevant translation solutions are examined. Though repetition plays a central role in the novel, translators show a marked stylistic strategy to avoid them. The results of the study suggest that application of corpus tools may help translators to uncover the structure of the text and keep their translation consistent.

"Taking as stimulus some key ideas of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and his collaborator the psychoanalyst, Félix Guattari, I demonstrate an alternative interpretative engagement with poetry. In this approach, a poem is seen as an invitation to the reader to be creative via a web-based, interpretative journey which is individual, edifying and refreshing. This approach allows a poem’s obliqueness and suggestiveness to trigger, randomly, knowledge and resources on the world-wide-web that are new for the reader; in turn, these can be used as fresh perspectives on the poem in order to perform it in individual ways, to ‘fill in’ creatively personas and scenarios in the poem. This web-based engagement with a poem involves stylistic analysis.
The web-based element of performance stylistics is centrifugal, taking the reader outside of the poem, travelling from website to website. This centrifugal movement is balanced by a centripetal one which takes the reader into the patterns of the poem. Stylistic analysis meets this centripetal need effectively. Traditionally, stylistic analysis has been used to provide linguistic evidence for interpretation of a literary work. However, influenced by ideas in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I also use stylistic analysis in a non-traditional way - to mobilise interpretation of a poem. In this article, the poem I use to demonstrate performance stylistics is Robert Frost’s, ‘Putting in the Seed’. Performance stylistics can draw on corpus analysis too."

The DOCS bibliography contains publications (including PhD theses) directly related to the use of corpora and corpus linguistic techniques in discourse studies – or, seen from a different perspective, corpus studies focusing on discourse issues. The approach may be ‘corpus-based’, ‘corpus-driven’ or ‘corpus-assisted’ (to the extent that these distinctions are useful or, indeed, meaningful), and the analysis itself can be ‘critical’ or otherwise (again, the same reservations apply). There are no restrictions regarding language. Whatever the label attached to their approach, publications are relevant when they …
• report on research using corpora and corpus techniques to examine discourse meaning/style and/or particular discourses, or
• discuss the compilation of corpora, or the development of corpus metrics/techniques, for discourse studies.

Please note that studies focusing on discourse or lexicogrammatical features/patterns are relevant here only if they explicitly discuss how these features/patterns contribute to discourse meaning or style, or to the creation of particular discourses.

The publications are ordered chronologically, starting with a list of introductions and overviews. I opted for a chronological order, because it helps provide a sketch of beginnings and developments in terms of the focus and methodology of discourse-oriented corpus studies and the volume of publications. For example, it can be seen that attention to discourse features dates back to the beginnings of corpus linguistics. Also, the beginning of the approach often referred to as ‘critical discourse studies’ can be traced back to Leech & Fallon (1992), which also seems to be the first study to use an exploratory keyness analysis — four years before the terms keyness and keyness analysis  were introduced.

In James Joyce’s short story, ‘Eveline’, a young woman is thinking about a new life away from an unhappy existence which involves caring for a violent father. In the story, Eveline is to elope with Frank to Buenos Aires, but Eveline fails to join him on the night boat. This story has attracted much critical attention. In particular, commentators have picked up on the faint clues throughout that Eveline is not going to leave her home. It is as though Eveline’s subconscious is communicating this while she is consciously reflecting on whether to elope with Frank. But how can such clues be identified in a systematic way whilst responding to the familiar charges made by Stanley Fish that stylistic analysis and interpretation is arbitrary and circular? In this article, I perform a corpus-informed stylistic analysis of ‘Eveline’ in order to reveal some of these subconscious intimations whilst reducing as much as possible arbitrariness and circularity in analysis and interpretation. To do so, I build on formal insights into ‘Eveline’ provided in Michael Stubbs’s corpus-informed analysis by proceeding to a more functional exploration of the story.

Call for abstracts Languaging Diversity 2018 (University of Leuven, Antwerp [Belgium]):
EXTENDED DEADLINE: 15 May 2018

Dear colleagues,

Due to several requests, we extended the deadline of the call for papers for the 5th International Conference Languaging Diversity 2018 which will take place at the University of Leuven, Antwerp (Belgium) from Thu 27th September to Sat 29th September 2018. New deadline for abstract submission: 15 May 2018.
Following the four successful events hosted by the Universities of Naples (2013), Catania (2014), Macerata (2016) and Cagliari (2017), where topics such as diversity, alterity, power and social class have been explored with reference to gender, ethnicity and culture, we bring the Languaging Diversity Conference series outside the boundaries of Italy. The theme of the conference this year is Discourse and Diversity in the Global City, with a focus on discourse and urban globalisation.

Foregrounding (e.g. Leech 1965, 1985; Leech and Short 1981), whereby certain linguistic elements in literary works differ consistently and systematically (Mukařovsky 1958: 44) from norms represented by a particular benchmark, has often been measured using corpus stylistics methods (e.g. Mahlberg 2013; Stubbs 2005).
While most such studies have focussed on works in their original language, ours instead compares the translation with the original text. More specifically, we explore the stylistic elements identified in Julian Barnes’ novel ‘The Sense of an Ending’ in the original and in its Italian translation. Indeed, if translators need to recreate predominant stylistic features of the Source Text in order to maintain stylistic or translational equivalence (Popovic 1976), then the functional equivalent (ibid. 1976: 6) of any significant foregrounding in the ST should be recreated in the Target Text.
Drawing on earlier studies of Barnes’ style (e.g. Shepherd and Berber Sardinha 2013), this work further explores aspects such as point of view (Simpson 1993) and the significance of memory in the novel by comparing the two parts of the ST and the TT, thus applying notions of tertiary or internal deviation (Leech 1985). Corpus stylistics methods were used to identify ‘good bets’ (Leech 2008: 164) which were then subjected to qualitative analysis. It was found for example that key clusters belonging to the category of ‘uncertain impressionistic perceptions’ (Shepherd and Berber Sardinha 2013), frequent in the ST, were minimally present in the key clusters of the TT. Instead, a number of Mental processes figured among the keywords of Part Two when compared with Part One of the TT, whereas this was not the case in the ST.

References

Leech, G.N. 1965. “‘This bread I break’: Language and Interpretation”, Review of English Literature, 6.2 London: Longmans, Green.
Leech, G.N. 1985. “Stylistics”. In T. van Dijk (ed.) Discourse and literature: new approaches to the analysis of literary genres. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Leech, G.N. 2008. Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. Harlow: Pearson Longman.
Leech, G. N. and Short M. H. 1981. Style in fiction: a linguistic introduction to English fictional prose. London: Longman
Mahlberg, M. 2013. Corpus stylistics and Dickens’s fiction.  New York/London: Routledge.
Mukařovsky, J.  1958. “Standard language and poetic language”. In P. L. Garvin (ed. and tr.) A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style. Washington D.C.: American University Language Centre.
Popovic, A. 1976. A Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation. Edmonton: Department of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta.
Shepherd, T.M.G. and Berber Sardinha, T. 2013. “A Rough Guide to doing Corpus Stylistics”. Matraga, rio de janeiro, v.20, n.32, Jan/Jun. 2013.
Simpson, P. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London/New York: Routledge.
Stubbs, M. 2005. “Conrad in the computer: examples of quantitative stylistics methods”, Language and Literature, 14 (1): 5-24.

The aim of this paper is to detect the linguistic construction of fe/male characters in a specialised literary corpus. The corpus (GHANEM) consists of Qais Ghanem's three novels Final Flight from Yemen (2011), Two Boys from Aden College (2012) and Forbidden Love in the Land of Sheba (2014), which are respectively referred to as FFFS, TBAC and FLLS henceforth. The collocations of major Yemeni characters as well as their shared collocates are analysed using collocational networks created by the GraphColl function in the corpus analytical tool LancsBox. The quantitative collocation analysis aids in extracting concordance lines for the in-depth qualitative analysis at the lexical level investigating adjectives and nouns collocates, and at the lexico-grammatical level through looking at transitivity processes (e.g. material, mental, relational) as set out in Burton (1982) and adapted later by Mills (1995). The analysis results in the following: not all characters belonging to the same gender are equally represented. All the male characters along with one female character (Hana) are evaluated as cheerful and playful. These are lively characters who are able to express feelings and thoughts and relate to others. On the other hand, the other female characters Salma and Muna are depicted as sufferers who are indifferent, unimportant and dependent.

Social roles for men and women are often perceived to be pre-determined in the Early Modern period, and literary criticism is grounded within these assumptions. I suggest that literary representation of men and women are dependent upon underlying linguistic structures and patterns
that would not necessarily be noticed by human readers. Computers are ideal for finding such patterns: traditional
methods of literary analysis are often blind to such structures. Through a combination of multiple corpus-driven tools, I investigate grammatical possession (his/her +NP) in a comparative study of two contrastive Shakespeare plays:
Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Winsdor.
Macbeth focuses heavily on issues of masculinity; it is presented in contrast to The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play focused entirely on women. I suggest that specific collocational patterns for male and female characters are comparable
across two very contrastive plays. The representation of men and women in these two plays are not always consistent with
a literary critic’s unde rstanding of gender
in these texts. I suggest that these grammatical structures inform the roles that men and women of these plays fulfill, which are then manifested in a literary understanding of the text.

A popular interest in Shakespeare has been matched in recent years by an increasing number of computer-assisted analyses of the plays. Although not without their critics, corpus stylistic studies have offered scope and reliability in the study of literary texts, particularly through key word analyses. In this paper, I show how Wmatrix, a web-based corpus processing environment , in conjunction with other corpus tools, can systematically extend such key analyses from words, to parts of speech and semantic fields. By so doing, a greater understanding of linguistic aspects of an author's literary output may be achieved. This study is based on a key word, grammatical category and semantic field analysis of soliloquies and asides in 12 Shakespeare plays. An investigation of the linguistic characteristics of soliloquies/asides as opposed to dialogic speech reveals the overuse of the interjection O and words related to the body. Comparisons of soliloquies across genres tend to match intuitive assumptions. Finally, soliloquies written in the later period (1596-1606) tend to have a far greater proportion of 'the (noun) of (noun phrase)' structures. The paper ends by suggesting that more empirical work of this nature is needed to underpin qualitative literary judgements.

If " happy " to means " I have been caught out " ; and " sorry to " means " apologizing is how I get my way " ; and " disappointed " means " I am a diplomat " , then surely we are dealing with a Turingesque code whose meanings are now recoverable by means of induction as the basis upon which reference corpora will eventually find all of its meanings. As the quantum expects us to replace the laws of causality with the laws of probability, we can expect several " magical innovative " changes of emphasis. A quantum subtextual inductive search of individuals' language carries with it (1) a return to seeing the other side as persons rather than as typecast personalities such as " good guy " , " hard liner " or " sweeper " etc, (2) probabilistically determined " next moves " become potential prospections, and (3) the revealing of hidden detail as objects or even personal obsessions. But as we respond to this quantum requirement, we need to plan in-house detailed research programmes that are driven by improved inductive and subtextual method.

The purpose of this PhD dissertation is to analyze Charles Dickens’ use of speech verbs in his fourteen major novels (c. 3.8 million words). Apart from their basic function as speech-introducing verbs, they can also contribute to characterization. This additional stylistic function is explored here. In order to do so, a corpus stylistic approach has been adopted, which has allowed the retrieval of 17,021 tokens of 130 different types. In the first stage of the analysis, the relevance of this stylistic phenomenon is investigated against the backdrop of a reference corpus (c. 12.9 million words) consisting of seven different Victorian authors: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. Subsequently, Dickens’ use of speech verbs is analyzed from different perspectives. Firstly, a general analysis looks into aspects such as the distribution of verbs in the corpus, those most frequently used in each novel, those associated with a single character in one novel or even those associated with only one character in the fourteen novels, among others. Secondly, Dickens’ use of speech verbs is analyzed according to gender. Indeed, there are verbs which introduce either men’s or women’s words exclusively. As will be seen, this set of gender-specific verbs reveals a striking contrast when reporting male and female discourse, which contributes to portraying men and women in completely different ways. Also, speech verbs are examined according to the narrators that tell the stories, for there exist significant differences between the voices used by Dickens to narrate the novels. The catalogue of speech verbs used by the narrators that take part in the stories is different from the one used by the narrators who do not play a part in it —both choices affecting the way in which characters are depicted. Finally, Dickens’ use of speech verbs is analyzed from the point of view of the original serialized publication of the novels. Indeed, publishing in installments influenced Dickens’ style, which, in terms of speech verbs, resulted in specific choices used to gloss characters’ words when, for example, they reappear after some installments —weeks or even moths— out of the story. The use of specific speech verbs helps readers to recall characters after these time gaps. In sum, the analysis of speech verbs from these viewpoints will demonstrate the stylistic role of this element in Dickens’ novels, thus revealing another relevant feature among his well-known techniques of characterization.

The hallmark of Network Text Analysis (NTA) is the creation of semantic networks or concept maps from linguistic data. Its key insight—one borrowed from studies in Social Network Analysis—is that the position of concepts within such networks reveals vital information about the meaning of the text as a whole. A second hallmark of NTA is that the structure and size of a network are independent of the frequency of the words of which it is comprised. In this paper we demonstrate the application of NTA to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (HoD). Using morphological and etymological relationships as the basis for the network, we first represent HoD as a network consisting of over 385 nodes. We then compare and contrast the results of our network analysis with those reported in a widely-cited corpus stylistic analysis of HoD. While our results are remarkably consistent with and complementary to results in that study, we also report results not identified in that analysis, results which could only have been identified using NTA.

Method (Gk. Meta+hodos) means an 'after-path'. Radical revisions of methodology follow momentous paradigm-shifts within scientific theories. Hence linguistic-stylistics developed analogue collocation into its digital counterpart, especially through the discovery of semantic prosodies (Sinclair, 2004b; Louw, 1993). This led to the recognition (Louw, 1991; 2000; 2007d) that all literary devices have a corpus-accessible feature in common: relexicalisation. Delexicalisation arose out of developments in lexicography. Sinclair refers to the two terms as forming a continuum (Sinclair, 2004a: 198fn18). This continuum is marked (Enkvist, 1973), unlike Hoey's (2005) purported, but psychologist priming. He omits Firth's (1957) precondition that collocation is abstracted from syntax and that collocative (relexicalising) power falls off within four words on either side of a node. This paper explores the consequences for science and glossaries of literary terms of collocation as instrumentation for meaning.

This study is an exploratory investigation into lexico-grammatical items specific to a large corpus of English-language postwar novels, as compared to corpora of conversation, news and academic English. Its overall aim is threefold: first, to show how the subjective impression of 'literariness' arising from fictional works is at least partly based on the statistically significant use of highly specific words and lexico-grammatical configurations; second, to attempt a broad classification of key words and patterns; third, to illustrate the fiction-specific patterns formed by three key words. Analysis proceeded in three steps. First, a key word analysis was performed. In the second step, all two-to-five word strings contained in the English corpus were generated. In the third step, multi-word strings, collocations and colligations associated with three English key words ('thought' , 'sun' and 'jerk') were analysed. Results indicate that postwar fiction is characterized by the dense use of specific sets of key words and key patterns, such as multi-word strings (must have been), phrase frames (like a + NP, there was a + NP) colliga-tions (PossDet thoughts were on NP), collocations (the strengthening sun) and lexically specific narrative patterns (PossDet thoughts were interrupted when/ as + time clause). The patterns in question are shown to be interconnected through a complex web of analogical creations. Implications are discussed for theories of literature, lexicology and translation.

It is the intention of this paper to offer readers a practical approach to stylistics. However, the approach must simultaneously attempt to outline and demonstrate the power of the theories in contextual linguistics and analytic philosophy that have accounted for recent success in the practices and procedures of stylistics. They form the basis of a new and powerful method that is likely to dominate corpus stylistics into the future.  My main intention will be to provide verifiable and scientific results that no amount of cognition, concepts, ideas and intuition could reasonably be said to have foreseen. It is a signal honour to be able to do this in a volume that celebrates the research of Professor Luis Quereda, whom I first met at the founding conference on Teaching and Language Corpora [TaLC1] in Lancaster in the 90s. His detailed and unsullied work on J.R.Firth is greatly appreciated at a time when British linguistics is manifestly under pressure to become ‘Alliance’ (sic) linguistics.

In about 350 BC Aristotle committed to writing in one of his major works (Metaphysics) what may well be judged today to be the most enduring linguistic and philosophical paradox of all time. He states it as follows: 'The objects of mathematics are not substances in any higher sense than things. They are only logically prior, not prior in being, to sensible things. Mathematical entities can in no way exist on their own. But since they cannot exist in perceivable objects either, they must therefore not exist at all, or exist in some special way which does not imply independent existence. For 'to exist' can mean many different things.' (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1077b 12-17). This paragraph demonstrates that the link between logic and metaphysics in natural language was not only sufficient to leave Aristotle confused to the point of reductio ad absurdum ('they must therefore not exist at all'), but it is only satisfactorily solved 2360 years later by means of corpus-derived subtext and its consilience with the absent lexical collocates of the given. Computers do not suffer from intuitive opacity. They furnish a method, in the interests of induction, for separating the logic of full sentences from their metaphysics. The product of this activity gives rise both to verification and to uneasy humour as diverse theories of their own accord leap to one another's assistance.

The article presents an investigation of semantic and information structures; the former mainly characterises style (of a writer, a cyclus or a single piece of work), and the latter
refers to the content of the work and/or cyclus. Based on computational experiment and experiments with informants, the research allows us to characterise formally Nikolai
Gogol’s works. Particular attention is given to interaction and intersection of information and semantic structures – phenomena, distinguishing fiction from highly informative
text genres (scientific papers and news).

John Fowles's The Magus was first published in 1966. He then revised and republished it in 1977. My doctoral research is a comparative stylistic analysis of the two editions of the novel. In this paper, I will explore (i) what differences there are between the two versions by using particular corpus techniques on them and (ii) to what extent stylistic investigation and corpus techniques can be usefully combined.

This paper examines the fragmentation of the fe/male characters in a one-novel corpus (henceforth, FFFS Corpus). The text is Final Flight From Sanaa, a Yemeni novel written by Qais Ghanem and published in 2011. The paper unfolds how the fe/male characters are introduced and talked about as anatomical parts in order to describe differences or similarities in gender representation, and to explore power relations and cultural differences between the eastern and western men and women. The analysis is done qualitatively using the feminist stylistic approach set out in Mills (1995) and quantitatively with the help of the corpus linguistic tool Wmatrix. Results have demonstrated that although the female and male bodies are almost equally fragmented, they are depicted differently. For example, female characters are introduced in terms of their physical attractiveness and sexuality while their male counterparts are focalized via their colors, physical deficiencies, skills, personality traits and the level of power they possess (whether physical or social).