Dan McIntyre

A corpus-based approach to mind style

Abstract Fowlers (Linguistics and the novel, Methuen, 1977) original definition of mind style emphasised consistency as a defining feature of the phenomenon, something that is (i) difficult to measure, and (ii) often missed in qualitative analyses. In this paper we investigate how a computational semantic analysis might be used to address this difficulty, with particular reference to McIntyres (Journal of Literary Semantics 34: 21–40, 2005) analysis of the deviant mind style of the character of Miss Shepherd in Alan Bennetts play The Lady in the Van. To do this we analyse the speech of all the characters in The Lady in the Van using Wmatrix (Rayson, Matrix: A statistical method and software tool for linguistic analysis through corpus comparison, Lancaster University PhD thesis, 2003, Wmatrix: A web-based corpus processing environment, Lancaster University, 2008), to see whether it provides quantitative support for the interpretative conclusions reached by McIntyre. Wmatrix utilises the UCREL Semantic Annotation System (USAS) which has been designed to undertake the automatic semantic analysis of English. The initial tag-set of the USAS system was loosely based on McArthurs Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (McArthur, Longman, 1981), but has since been considerably revised in the light of practical tagging problems met in the course of previous research, and now contains 232 category labels (such as medicine and medical treatment, movement, obligation and necessity , etc.). We use Wmatrixs facility for identifying key semantic domains in pursuit of our two main aims: (i) to determine whether Miss Shepherds odd mind style is consistent, as Fowlers definition suggests it should be; and (ii) to determine the usefulness of computational semantic analysis for investigating mind style.

The year’s work in stylistics 2009

At a recent conference on the linguistics of English (ISLE, Freiburg, 2008) I was surprised by the number of talks on topics that for me were clearly related to stylistics. My surprise was not that stylistics papers should be so prevalent at a linguistics conference but that the presenters of these papers seemed not to consider their work as primarily stylistic in nature. Most positioned themselves as historical linguists or sociolinguists and presented their work as contributions to historical linguistics and sociolinguistics respectively, despite the fact that all of them were concerned with aspects of style. Along with a number of PALA colleagues, I gave a paper in a dedicated stylistics strand, though in retrospect it now seems that it would perhaps have been more valuable to have integrated our explicitly stylistic papers into the conference generally; after all, the interest in stylistics was clearly there, even if it was not designated as such.

The year’s work in stylistics 2010

2010 saw the 30th annual conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), hosted by the University of Genoa. An inspiring and packed programme in beautiful surroundings underlined the strength of PALA as the world’s foremost association for academics working at the interface of language and literature. PALA has come a long way since its beginnings as a UK-based offshoot of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, and the wealth of published work in stylistics in 2010 is testament to its development over the past 30 years and to the general good health of the discipline. The Genoa conference provided an ideal opportunity to celebrate this and to look forward to the future. One of the ways in which this was done was through the publication of a Festschrift volume to honour PALA’s founder, Mick Short. This book, an overview of stylistics as it is currently practised, makes an ideal starting point for this year’s review. Language and Style: In Honour of Mick Short (McIntyre and Busse, 2010) is an edited collection of 27 chapters representing the state-of-the-art in (primarily) literary stylistics. The book celebrates Mick Short’s influence on the development of our discipline and was presented to Mick at an evening reception at the Genoa conference, where it became clear that strenuous efforts to keep its publication a secret over the preceding two years had been a wholly unanticipated success! The structure of the book was inspired by Mick Short’s own textbook, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose (Short, 1996), which is, of course, divided into three sections, each focusing on one of the three main literary genres. To this end, Language and Style is also genre-based in structure, with each chapter demonstrating the application of a particular analytical technique. So, for example, Tom Barney’s (2010) chapter demonstrates the value of phonetic analysis in the understanding of poetry while Michael Toolan (2010a) shows how an awareness