Language and Literature. A Corpus Stylistic Approach to Charles Dickens

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Osnabrück, language: English, abstract: Early Corpus linguistics and stylistics began with Chomsky¿s approach to language. He explicitly stated that there are three levels of adequacy upon which grammatical and linguistic theories can be evaluated: observational adequacy, descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy .

This ¿revolution¿ through Chomsky founded the basis for corpus-based analysis, a method which uses adequate examples to give introspection how a language works and how it is used by different authors. Corpus-based analysis offers new insights into studies of language and new computer tools and software make it possible to get access to a wide range of electronic corpora.

In my research paper I will carry out a corpus stylistic approach to the language of 19th century author Charles Dickens. This means that I will basically focus on his special register and investigate his use of particular clusters as recurrent combinations of words used in his corpus. Furthermore, I will focus on A Christmas Carol (1843) as an exemplifying novel of how language patterns are used by Dickens. This masterpiece has the smallest number of words of all his novels, namely 28.541 , which renders it a special challenge to analyse. Moreover, it hasn¿t been analysed by many corpus linguists before which puts A Christmas Carol in the light of a nearly unexamined piece of art ready to explore.

My thesis which will be developed in the following chapters would be that Dickens¿s novels, especially A Christmas Carol, provide a unit of meaning, their own worlds of text, in which Dickens¿s unique style can be sifted out, providing recurring clusters which offer a corpus work based on effective comparison.

To enter the deep analysis to provide a well-worked out research paper I will start with a description and findings of corpus analysis. Secondly, I will spend a chapter on three-, four- and five-word clusters in the Dickens Corpus and especially A Christmas Carol with particular focus on five-word clusters. Moreover, I will introduce the five categories of labels, body part, speech, time and place and as if clusters and examine these categories in Dickens¿s Great Expectations (1861) and A Christmas Carol as two examples of a contrastive analysis. I will finish my work by concluding my previous discoveries.