Stylistics: Corpus Approaches

Stylistics, which may be defined as the study of the language of literature, makes use of various tools of linguistic analysis. Corpus linguistics is opening up new vistas for the study of language, and there are interesting similarities in the approaches of stylistics and corpus linguistics. Stylistics is a field of empirical inquiry, in which the insights and techniques of linguistic theory are used to analyse literary texts. A typical way to do stylistics is to apply the systems of categorisation and analysis of linguistic science to poems and prose, using theories relating to, for example, phonetics, syntax and semantics. Theories and techniques of analysis from other areas such as sociolinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and historical linguistics are also brought to bear on texts. These approaches are typified by Leech and Short (1981) and Short (1996). The empirical approach to stylistics relies on linguistic evidence in the literary work. Corpus linguistics, also an empirical approach to linguistic description, relies on the evidence of language usage as collected and analysed in corpora. Burrows (2002) pointed out some underlying similarities of approach: "Traditional and computational forms of stylistics have more in common than is obvious at first sight. Both rely upon the close analysis of texts, and both benefit from opportunities for comparison.” As linguists and stylisticians have become more aware of the possibilities offered by corpus resources and techniques, there have been increasing numbers of studies published which suggest that the coming together of these fields can be fruitful (e.g. Stubbs 2005). It is perhaps surprising, then, that apart from some important studies described here, there is little use of language corpora, or the techniques of corpus linguistics, in the study of literary style. But the use of language corpora is becoming more widespread and more mainstream, as various barriers to the their uptake are overcome. Among the important areas of current activity, at least two different approaches (corpus annotation and the analysis of collocation) can be discerned.