A Corpus Stylistic Analysis Of George Eliot's Novels

Corpus stylistics is a relatively new research area in which corpus linguistics is combined with literary stylistics to study literary works.Corpus stylistics started in the 1960s and developed in the 1980s and 1990s.The development of machine-readable corpora and corpus technology provides an innovative and effective method for literary research,which enables a more detailed and in-depth description of literary works on the basis of quantitative data and corpus analysis.George Eliot was a great writer of the Victorian age,who had received education in a religious school and been enormously influenced by religious beliefs.Numerous literary studies on Eliot's novels have been done;however,very few studies have been conducted by applying quantitative methods of text and corpus analysis to a stylistic interpretation of Eliot's novels.This study looks at Eliot's novels from the corpus stylistic perspective and is conducted in a corpus stylistic theoretical context,with Fischer-Starcke's and Mahlberg's theories as its theoretical foundation.Its analysis is based on two comparable corpora:the Eliot corpus containing 11 novels by Eliot and the 19th century corpus consisting of 11 novels by different writers from the nineteenth century.The research focuses on keywords and 4-word key clusters,which are obtained by performing the KeyWords function in WordSmith.It intends to answer the following two questions:(1)What stylistic features can be revealed by the four-word key clusters data?(2)What stylistic features can be disclosed by the keywords data?The analysis of the obtained corpus data shows that,compared with her contemporaries,Eliot tends more to use Intention clusters,Speech clusters,As if clusters,and Time and Place clusters;for keywords,she is more than other writers in her time likely to use Sensation words,Religion words,Modal verbs,Indefinite pronouns,Conjunctions,Mental words and Hedge words.The comparison of 5-word key clusters between Mahlberg's study on Dickens' novels and the present study on Eliot's novels reveals that 1)unlike Dickens,Eliot does not favor body words for characterization,and 2)although both Eliot and Dickens use more As If clusters than their contemporaries respectively,they prefer different tenses in the subjunctive mood use of such clusters:Eliot favors past perfective tense,while Dickens more likes past tense.