A Brown Corpus Interpretation Of Language Features In The Sound And The Fury

William Faulkner (1897-1962)，one of the most famous American novelists in the20thcentury, won the Nobel Prize for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to themodern novel in1949, and started his significant status in the literary world. All his life, hewrote19novels,75short stories and2volumes of poetry, most of which are set in the Southof America, in an imaginary place called “Yoknapatawpha County” modeled on hishometown, New Oxford. The Sound and the Fury (1929) is one of his masterpieces, whichrepresents the maturity of his writing style, for in his novel he uses various narrative styles,including multi-narration, interior monologue, excessive sentence-length and stream ofconsciousness. Of course, the studies on such artistic styles have become the focus of thescholars both in China and abroad.This thesis aims to conduct the interpretation on the language features in The Sound andthe Fury from two levels: the lexical level and the syntactic level by using Brown Corpus. Onthe lexical level, the thesis analyzes the language features of the novel from four aspects, i.e.the word tokens, word length, word frequency and keyword in The Sound and the Fury, whereFaulkner’s four narration voices are very distinctive, for which, he uses different languageresources and linguistic techniques to reflect their different status and educational levels. Onthe syntactic level, the language features will be analyzed from the aspects of sentence length,coordination and subordination. The difference of sentence length for each narration voicetells the reader much about the narrators’ characteristics. The complex of the sentencestructure and grammar structure he distinctly uses helps to convey the complexity of thenovel’s theme and narrators’ characteristics.The interpretation is based on Brown Corpus, which is used as a reference corpus. Byutilizing two computer software packages, the thesis extracts data information from both thereference corpus and the observed corpus, The Sound and the Fury to do the comparison andinterpretation. Brown Corpus is a famous computer-readable general corpus of texts,developed by W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kucera at Brown University in the1960s. Twogeneral text categories comprising Brown Corpus are informative prose and imaginative prose.The compilation of Brown Corpus took place in the face of massive indifference if notoutright hostility from those who espoused the conventional wisdom of the new andincreasingly dominant paradigm in US linguistics. However, by now, Brown corpus has beenused in various computational analyses, such as linguistic analysis, statistical analysis, psychological analysis and sociological analysis. Since it contains18different types of texts,the author has chosen only the imaginative prose (K-R, which is the imaginative style), thecounterparts to the observed corpus as the reference corpus to do this research. Theimaginative prose section focuses on general fiction, mystery and detective fiction, sciencefiction, adventure and Western fiction, romance and love story and humor, which amount to126texts. All of them were published in the1960s in the United States, so they can representseveral characteristics of modern American English in the United States, which makes itpossible to analyze Faulkner’s works by comparing with these texts. Besides, The Sound andthe Fury was published in1929, sharing several linguistic features with those works of the1960s. For this reason, it is much more justified in comparing this novel with Brown Corpusfor interpretation of language features in The Sound and the Fury. Based on these feasibilities,the thesis is to separate four parts of The Sound and the Fury, and compare one another withBrown Corpus to interpret the language features of the novel.Generally speaking, Brown Corpus interpretation of language features belongs to theapplication of corpus-based methodology. Comparing with the traditional literature analysismethod, using this corpus-based approach to analyze The Sound and the Fury has thefollowing specificities. First of all, it is a more objective, reliable and efficient approach tocollect the information from the observed texts than a manual one, for the computer softwaredoes the job automatically. Secondly, this approach makes it easier to handle a large quantityof electronic-stored literary texts, which has become a trend in modern literary research.Thirdly, it enables the researchers to make a thorough analysis of the whole text, as well asmake comparison among different texts. To fulfill the task, two important computer softwarepackages: WordSmith and AntConc are used in this thesis. WordSmith Tool is one powerfulintegrated software package which includes concord, wordlist, keywords, splitter, textconverter and viewer etc, while AntConc is a comparatively simple concordance program,which contains similar tools as WordSmith. They are both widely used in corpus linguisticresearch and empirical research.There are six chapters in this thesis. The first chapter includes a brief introduction toWilliam Faulkner, the novel The Sound and the Fury, Brown Corpus and the structure of thethesis. The second chapter reviews the previous critical studies of The Sound and the Fury,from which we can see that the novel is of great literary value. The third chaptersystematically explains the theoretical framework upon which this thesis based: the definitionof style, stylistics and the corpus linguistics theories. The fourth chapter focuses on thecorpus-based methodology used to conduct the research: the introduction of the tools used in the research and the “description, interpretation and evaluation” researching procedure. Thefifth chapter which comprises the main body of this thesis interprets that the language of TheSound and the Fury has various characteristics of lexis and syntax in different parts throughdetailed data analysis and comparison. From this interpretation, we can appreciate Faulkner’sexquisite ability of conducting English language. The last chapter summarizes the results ofthe research. By drawing conclusions based on the results, the thesis confirms that the corpusbased analysis methodology of language features is feasible, and points out the limitation ofthe corpus-based approach and the expectation for the future study on The Sound and theFury by using corpus-based approach to make up these deficiencies.