A Corpus-based Analysis Of Salient Linguistic Features Of The Twilight Saga

Composed of four vampire-themed fantasy romance fictions----Twilight, NewMoon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, The Twilight Saga has gained tremendouspopularity all over the world. The present paper aims to use Biber’s MD/MF approachto identify and analyze salient linguistic features that contribute to the series’popularity and recognition. This paper adopts a corpus-based approach and mainlyincludes two corpora: TSC (Twilight Saga Corpus) and Frown_K-R (literary section:category K-R in Frown Corpus). Biber’s (1988) MF/MD approach to genre analysis isapplied to compare, contrast and analyze57salient linguistic features of TSC withthose of Frown_K-R along6dimensions. To make the analysis more convincing,Frownj (academic prose section: category J in Frown Corpus) is also included in thecomparison of Dimension1.This paper performs a basic analysis and then a detailed analysis of the salientlinguistic features in The Twilight Saga. In terms of the basic analysis, Wordsmith3.0is used to calculate type/token ratio, average word length, sentence length and thepercentage of content words and so on of TSC and Frown_K-R; and Range29isapplied to count tokens, types and word families that belong to the first, second andthird1000frequent words of the two corpora. On the basis of Biber’s MF/MDapproach to genre analysis, the detailed analysis uses Wordsmith3.0and SPSS tocalculate the factor scores of each feature and then the dimension scores for Factors1-6in TSC and Frown_K-R respectively. Then the dimension scores of the twocorpora are compared, followed by reasonably functional interpretations and analyses.Findings of this research show that The Twilight Saga has a lower lexical densityand lower lexical sophistication, and tends to use shorter words and sentences butfewer nouns than Frown_K-R, making the series concise, colloquial and easier to read.In addition, compared with Frown_K-R, The Twilight Saga is highly characterized byinvolvement and interaction (Dimension1); it is more characterized bycontext-dependent reference (Dimension3), more overt persuasion (Dimension4) andnon-abstract information (Dimension5); it has a slightly higher degree of narrativeness (Dimension2) and non-online-informational elaboration (Dimension6).