Literary style and literary texts
Mahlberg M (2015)
Publication Type: Authored book
Publication year: 2015
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139764377
DOI: 10.1007/9781139764377.020
Abstract
According to Leech (2008: 55), “[t]he study of style is essentially the study of variation in the use of language” (emphasis in the original). The study of style in literary texts is typically seen as the remit of literary stylistics. In the same way that corpus-linguistic methods are increasingly used in a range of linguistic and language-related fields, there is also growing interest in the application of corpus methods to the study of literary texts. Over the past decade, the use of the term “corpus stylistics” has reflected this growing interest. Sometimes the term corpus stylistics indicates a disciplinary background out of which a particular study has developed. However, Biber (2011: 20) critically observes that the “spin on the historical development of corpus-stylistic research disregards the long tradition of computational and statistical research on authorship attribution and literary style.” In this chapter I want to make a case for the conceptualization of corpus stylistics so that the term can serve to deliberately position work in a particular research context. For a meaningful approach to corpus stylistics it is important to discuss its relationship with related fields both in terms of methodologies and explanatory purposes. Corpus stylistics is the study of literary texts that employs corpus-linguistic methods to support the analysis of textual meanings and the interpretation of texts. As such, corpus-stylistic research makes it possible to focus on individual texts and even text extracts - as the places where the aesthetic effects of language are best analyzed (Leech and Short 2007: 11). Crucial for corpus-stylistic work in this sense is the intrinsic explanatory purpose of the linguistic analysis. Leech (2008: 54) distinguishes between “descriptive” and “explanatory” stylistics. For the former “the purpose is just to describe the style” and for the latter “the purpose is to use stylistics to explain something” (Leech 2008: 54).
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APA:
Mahlberg, M. (2015). Literary style and literary texts. Cambridge University Press.
MLA:
Mahlberg, Michaela. Literary style and literary texts. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
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