A Computational Stylistic Analysis Of Maurice Guest And The Georges' Wife

Stylistics is a both old and young subject which studies language styles through modern linguistic theories and methods. Stylistic research can be done in two ways: qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. Qualitative analysis is a research method by impression. Quantitative analysis is widely applied to the literary works as well as all kinds of practical styles. Researchers adopted quantitative analysis first in the literature field, for example, statistics has been used to analyze the styles of some writers or their woks. With the unceasing development of computer linguistics, the literary stylistic analysis method with the aid of computer has got more and more widespread application. Compared with the qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis of texts has some weakness, but it also has undeniable merits and application values: statistical data can describe the stylistic features precisely and objectively. Although computer can not conduct the analysis of the styles like human, it can seek, count and total some given language features in the massive texts.This paper is divided into five chapters. Chapter One introduces the significance, aim and focus, research methods and procedure and layout of this paper. Chapter Two presents some theories of stylistics and computational stylistics. Chapter Three gives a brief introduction to Australian literature, Australian female novel, two authors and two novels. Chapter Four, the focus of this paper, concentrates on data analysis of the two novels. Chapter Five is a conclusion.This paper attempts to apply computer statistic and analytic methods to systematic and objective analysis of the long novels of two famous Australian women novelists, one is Maurice Guest by the realist Henry Handel Richardson, the other is The Georges' Wife by modernist Elizabeth Jolly. Research on those two novels in China is mainly done in qualitative analysis and lacks necessary statistical data as evidence. So this paper aims to offer the evidence to the former research and to find new stylistic features by means of statistical data from quantitative analysis. Analysis of the form of the text languages such as lexical density, word frequency distribution, shared words and unshared words, word length, compound features, sentence length and syntax features will be adopted to compare the styles of the realistic novels with modernistic novels, so the conclusion can be drawn that there exist both similarities and significant differences between two writers.Both of them use typical British English. And they use similar words in length, which suggests similar word complexity and similar text formality to some extent. Next, proper sentences in length are used by them. However, other similarities in the above findings reflect the common features of English literary texts.Richardson tends to use standard words and derivational words, but in some cases she chooses long and complex words. She writes mostly in normal loose sentence with greater contrast in length and in point of view of the third person. Furthermore, she adopts direct speech to present dialogues; meanwhile, she is skillful in characterizing inner world. Thus Richardson not only follows the tradition of Australian national literature including predominance of plot narration and characterization as well as free, natural and conversational narrative style, but also deepens the national literature pioneered by Henry Lawson owing to her use of complex words and focus on depiction of psychological analysis.Jolly employs a richer vocabulary because she is skillful in coining words and in using non-standard words. Besides, she prefers to use compound words. She involves complicated contents in the viewpoint of the first person. In sentence structure, she tends to use free and flexible sentences with more pauses beyond the limitations of traditional syntax norms. Free direct speech and free indirect speech are massively used and these four different kinds of speeches are interwoven by Jolly. Free verbal repetitions (of words, phrases, sentence and plots) are discovered in a large quantity in Jolly's novels. All of the above stylistic features of Jolly's novels reflect those of contemporary novels in the stream of consciousness. Thus Jolly's novels have typical features of modern novels in stream of the consciousness, demonstrate complexity, changeability and uncertainty of consciousness of human beings, present the heroine's sentimental emotion and complicated mental progress and suggest the nature of life displacement due to inability to identify herself.Although the two novels are similar in word writing, word length, word complexity, sentence length and text formality; marked differences also exist. Richardson produces novels in the typical style of Australian realistic national literature. In contrast, Jolly, massively using expressive techniques of modernistic novels in the stream of consciousness, has typical characteristics of modernistic novels.A conclusion is drawn through primary quantitative analysis and some qualitative analysis on the base of statistical analysis of the two novels. It offers some statistical evidence to the existing analysis and conclusions on Richardson and Jolly, and finds some stylistic similarities between the two writers as well as some new linguistic features between them.