A Corpus Stylistic Analysis Of The Old Man And The Sea

With the development of the computer technology, corpus linguistics becomes a new discipline which plays an important role in linguistic study. The development of corpus linguistics opens a new way to stylistic analysis. Moreover, it has even become a trend to study stylistics with corpus-based approach.The present study examines, from the corpus-based approach, the stylistic features of Ernest Hemingway's famous work The Old Man and the Sea. The purpose of this research is to see how the corpus-based approach could be applied in the stylistic study of The Old Man and the Sea and to offer new and profound insights into the stylistic features of the novel. The theoretical framework put forward by Leech and Short (1981) is taken as the analytical foundation of the study. The framework is a checklist of features which are placed under four general headings which are the lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context.In order to fulfill the purposes of this study, an observed corpus and a reference corpus are constructed. The observed corpus is the electronic text of The Old Man and the Sea. The reference corpus is composed of the following electronic texts of the 20th century American novels: The Call of the Wild, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, An American Tragedy, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Sound and the Fury. And corpus access programs, AntConc and Writer's Workbench, are employed to access the data in the two corpora.Based on the analysis of the lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, and cohesion and context, a conclusion has been reached that though the style of The Old Man and the Sea is simple and natural on the surface, there are many evidences of meticulous craftsmanship with multiple meanings. Nearly every word points to Hemingway's dedication to the craft and devotion to precision; sentences abound in variation flow gracefully from one to another; the application of the figures of speech such as simile, symbolism, personification, and repetition produces the special stylistic effect and artistic appeal; Hemingway employs the direct speech and free direct speech to captured the immediacy of dialogue skillfully, and connects the various parts of the sentences in a straightforward and sequential way. The study further confirms that corpus-based approach to stylistics offers a new perspective to both the understanding and appreciation of the literary works.