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This book presents an innovative approach to the language of one of the most popular English authors. It illustrates how corpus linguistic methods can be employed to study electronic versions of texts by Charles Dickens. With particular focus on Dickens's novels, the book proposes a way into the Dickensian world that starts from linguistic patterns. The analysis begins with clusters, i.e. repeated sequences of words, as pointers to local textual functions. Combining quantitative findings with qualitative analyses, the book takes a fresh view on Dickens's techniques of characterisation, the literary presentation of body language and speech in fiction. The approach brings together corpus linguistics, literary stylistics and Dickens criticism. It thus contributes to bridging the gap between linguistic and literary studies and will be a useful resource for both researchers and students of English language and literature.
List of contents
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
About the author
Michaela Mahlberg is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK.
