Michaela Mahlberg

Corpus stylistics and Dickens's fiction

1. Corpus stylistics 2. Textual building blocks of fictional worlds 3. Starting with the texts: corpora, clusters and lexical bundles 4. Groups of clusters for the identification of local textual functions 5. Character speech 6. Body language 7. As if and the narrator comment 8. Labels - contextualising and highlighting functions 9. Conclusions and outlook

Mind-modelling with corpus stylistics in David Copperfield

We suggest an innovative approach to literary discourse by using corpus linguistic methods to address research questions from cognitive poetics. In this article, we focus on the way that readers engage in mind-modelling in the process of characterisation. The article sets out our cognitive poetic model of characterisation that emphasises the continuity between literary characterisation and real-life human relationships. The model also aims to deal with the modelling of the author’s mind in line with the modelling of the minds of fictional characters. Crucially, our approach to mind-modelling is text-driven. Therefore we are able to employ corpus linguistic techniques systematically to identify textual patterns that function as cues triggering character information. In this article, we explore our understanding of mind-modelling through the characterisation of Mr. Dick from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Using the CLiC tool (Corpus Linguistics in Cheshire) developed for the exploration of 19th-century fiction, we investigate the textual traces in non-quotations around this character, in order to draw out the techniques of characterisation other than speech presentation. We show that Mr. Dick is a thematically and authorially significant character in the novel, and we move towards a rigorous account of the reader’s modelling of authorial intention.

Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus

This article presents a computer-assisted approach to the study of character discourse in Dickens. It focuses on the concept of the ‘suspended quotation’ – the interruption of a character’s speech by at least five words of narrator text. After an outline of the concept of the suspended quotation as introduced by Lambert (1981), the article compares manually derived counts for suspensions in Dickens with automatically generated figures. This comparison shows how corpus methods can help to increase the scale at which the phenomenon is studied. It highlights that quantitative information for selected sections of a novel does not necessarily represent the patterns that are found across the whole text. The article also includes a qualitative analysis of suspensions. With the help of the new tool CLiC, it investigates interruptions of the speech of Mrs Sparsit in Hard Times and illustrates how suspensions can be useful places for the presentation of character information. CLiC is further used to find patterns of the word pause that provide insights into how suspensions contribute to the representation of pauses in character speech.

Exploring text-initial words, clusters and concgrams in a newspaper corpus

Abstract The notion of ‘textual colligation’ predicts that certain lexical items have a tendency to occur at particular points in a text, i.e. the beginning or end of texts, paragraphs or sentences. This paper describes new corpus-based methods developed to identify the profile of words, clusters (n-grams) and concgrams (non-contiguous patterns in variant order) in terms of their most common textual locations. Groups of co-occurring text-initial items are then analyzed in terms of their discourse function in relation to theories of newspaper structure. This analysis illustrates how methods from corpus linguistics, when targeted to specific textual positions, can complement text-linguistic analyses.

Corpus linguistics and the study of nineteenth-century fiction

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Reading Dickens’s characters: Employing psycholinguistic methods to investigate the cognitive reality of patterns in texts

This article reports the findings of an empirical study that uses eye-tracking and follow-up interviews as methods to investigate how participants read body language clusters in novels by Charles Dickens. The study builds on previous corpus stylistic work that has identified patterns of body language presentation as techniques of characterisation in Dickens (Mahlberg, 2013). The article focuses on the reading of ‘clusters’, that is, repeated sequences of words. It is set in a research context that brings together observations from both corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics on the processing of repeated patterns. The results show that the body language clusters are read significantly faster than the overall sample extracts which suggests that the clusters are stored as units in the brain. This finding is complemented by the results of the follow-up questions which indicate that readers do not seem to refer to the clusters when talking about character information, although they are able to refer to clusters when biased prompts are used to elicit information. Beyond the specific results of the study, this article makes a contribution to the development of complementary methods in literary stylistics and it points to directions for further subclassifications of clusters that could not be achieved on the basis of corpus data alone.

The corpus stylistic analysis of fiction – or the fiction of corpus stylistics?

This paper argues that corpus stylistics can contribute methodologies and concepts to support the investigation of character information in fiction. Focusing on Charles Dickens, the paper looks at lexicogrammatical patterns as well as places in the literary text. It suggests that clusters, i.e. repeated sequences of words, and suspensions, i.e. interruptions of characters’ speech by the narrator, can serve as textual cues in the process of characterization. These concepts are illustrated with examples for the characters Bucket and Tulkinghorn in Bleak House. The analysis of the examples leads to an outline of challenges for corpus stylistics that result from the need to interpret features on the textual surface in relation to the effects they might have on the processing of the text by readers.1

but it will take time…points of view on a lexical grammar of English

This paper presents a group of verb patterns that express aspects of the broad meaning ‘investing time’. The examples raise questions about criteria for a lexical grammar of English. Hunston & Francis’ (2000) Pattern Grammar approach provides a theoretical starting point. The article suggests a way of complementing this approach with a description of more specific groups of patterns.

Analysing the opinions of UK veterinarians on practice-based research using corpus linguistic and mathematical methods

The use of corpus linguistic techniques and other related mathematical analyses have rarely, if ever, been applied to qualitative data collected from the veterinary field. The aim of this study was to explore the use of a combination of corpus linguistic analyses and mathematical methods to investigate a free-text questionnaire dataset collected from 3796 UK veterinarians on evidence-based veterinary medicine, specifically, attitudes towards practice-based research (PBR) and improving the veterinary knowledge base. The corpus methods of key word, concordance and collocate analyses were used to identify patterns of meanings within the free text responses. Key words were determined by comparing the questionnaire data with a wordlist from the British National Corpus (representing general English text) using cross-tabs and log-likelihood comparisons to identify words that occur significantly more frequently in the questionnaire data. Concordance and collocation analyses were used to account for the contextual patterns in which such key words occurred, involving qualitative analysis and Mutual Information Analysis (MI3). Additionally, a mathematical topic modelling approach was used as a comparative analysis; words within the free text responses were grouped into topics based on their weight or importance within each response to find starting points for analysis of textual patterns. Results generated from using both qualitative and quantitative techniques identified that the perceived advantages of taking part in PBR centred on the themes of improving knowledge of both individuals and of the veterinary profession as a whole (illustrated by patterns around the words learning, improving, contributing). Time constraints (lack of time, time issues, time commitments) were the main concern of respondents in relation to taking part in PBR. Opinions of what vets could do to improve the veterinary knowledge base focussed on the collecting and sharing of information (record, report), particularly recording and discussing clinical cases (interesting cases), and undertaking relevant continuing professional development activities. The approach employed here demonstrated how corpus linguistics and mathematical methods can help to both identify and contextualise relevant linguistic patterns in the questionnaire responses. The results of the study inform those seeking to coordinate PBR initiatives about the motivators of veterinarians to participate in such initiatives and what concerns need to be addressed. The approach used in this study demonstrates a novel way of analysing textual data in veterinary research.