A Corpus-based Study On The Narrative Progression Of A Mercy

A Mercy,which represents Toni Morrison's late period of writing,is astonishing for its content.A Mercy tells a story that a black mother excuses herself from being taken away as a compensation of her slaveholder's debt,because she says that she has an infant to nurse,and she asks the land owner Jacob to take her 7-year-old daughter Florens instead.The black mother's behavior of abandon causes an incurable trauma on Florens' little heart,and this event has a terrible impact on her daughter's later life.By profoundly shaping the characters that are abandoned or slaved,Morrison tries to inspire readers' new understanding of slavery and humanity.The rich thematic meanings and narrative techniques of the novel have been catching researchers' eyes.Many studies have analyzed the novel's thematic meanings like slavery,gender discrimination and class conflicts from pure literary perspective;however,qualitative studies based on quantitative data are rare,and this mixed researching approach might help the researcher to find richer meanings of the text than previous studies.This thesis studies A Mercy from corpus stylistic perspective to analyze its narrative progression with James Phelan's theory of narrative progression and Michael Toolan's eight parameters of prospection of narrative progression as the theoretical foundation.This thesis adopts two kinds of corpora of A Mercy,namely,the raw text of twelve chapters of the whole novel and the tagged text with markers of part-of-speech.The study follows Michael Toolan's eight parameters to explore the narrative progression with the interpretation from the perspective of instabilities and tension.It aims to answer the following two questions:(1)What textual features guiding the narrative progression of A Mercy?(2)What possible influences have these textual features produced on readers?The major findings are summarized as follows:(1)Three textual features guiding the narrative progression of A Mercy,namely,sentences featuring named main characters,narrative-tense verbs and modality verbs,key words and key clusters,and free indirect thought.(2)These three textual features have three main effects on readers.a,It can strengthen readers' understanding of the images and meanings of characters.And the reader can construct characters' images and meanings through narrative-tense verbs;b,It can arouse readers' expectation like through sentences containing female names like Florens,Lina and Sorrow;c,It can make readers be involved in the narrative progression,and this process mainly relies on key words and key clusters and the description of characters' free indirect thought.The significance of the research mainly lies in the following two aspects:(1)corpus stylistics perspective can help the researcher to study the textual meanings that are neglected by previous studies,and it can also replenish research findings of qualitative analysis.(2)The study of narrative progression can not only enrich our understanding of theme,ethics and aesthetics,but also help us to dig out Morrison's profound thinking on complexity,versatility and dynamics of humanity.