A Corpus-Based Stylistic Analysis Of Agatha Christie's Mystery Fictions

Agatha Christie, acclaimed as Queen of the Golden Age, is one of the most celebrated mystery fiction writers in Britain, whose works have been appealing to readers worldwide and turned to be the world's best-selling books only outsold by The Bible. The previous studies on her works have mainly placed emphases on the plot setting, character description and historical status in mystery field, and most of the studies are literarily-oriented qualitative researches, based on intuition and hence tending to be subjective. This study, however, tries to make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of her mystery fictions, with corpus-based research methods and stylistics theories applied. To attain the goals, the study is based on five of Agatha Christie's most beloved and representative mystery fictions, respectively on the levels of lexicon, syntax and discourse. Meanwhile, a reference corpus is also built, which consists of literary novels by William Somerset Maugham, a contemporary British literary novelist. The paired data output and statistical tests can display the common characteristics Christie's mystery fictions share with literary novels, and at the same time distinguish their unique stylistic features as mystery fictions.The research shows that Agatha Christie's works share with literary novels some common features, such as the frequent use of pronouns and the employment of reference and adverbial connectors to maintain the cohesion of text. Those means jointly contribute to the smooth flow of story telling.In the meantime, they display some specialties as mystery fictions, listed as follows:1) Compared with literary novels, the lower distribution of nominalizations, smaller mean sentence length and less complex sentence structures (the frequencies of coordinators and subordinators are both lower than those of literary novels) diminish the tediousness and enhance the readability.2) The higher rate of exophoric reference in use inspires the readers' imagination and senses of involvement. Those features are determined by the entertaining value of mystery fictions.Besides, the lexical density and mean word length of Christie's mystery fictions are even larger than those of literary novels. This uniqueness is determined by Agatha Christie's authorship:her good command of literary narration and her typed way of getting the stories organized.