A Corpus Stylistic Study Of Toni Morrison's Novels

Toni Morrison is the first African American writer who wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.Up to now,she has published 11 novels,which are known for their epic themes,visionary force and poetic import,rich descriptions and profound insights into American reality.Owing to the profound themes and creative language,studies on her novels are emerging continuously.However,very few studies explore her novels from a quantitative standpoint by the corpus methods.Whereas corpus stylistics rises,corpus techniques and statistical approach are applied to investigate the stylistic features,opening a new vista for the research on literary works.Thus,on the basis of three corpus-linguistic principle for corpus stylistics:(1)language as a social phenomenon;(2)meaning and form are associated;(3)equivalence between significance and frequency,this study employs corpus methods and statistical means to make quantitatively comparative analysis on word length,lexical richness,lexical density,sentence length,four-word clusters and readability between Morrison corpus and Reference corpus,in order to find out the statistically significant differences.Based on this study,it finds that there is no significant difference between Morrison corpus and Reference corpus in terms of word length,lexical richness,and lexical density;however,it shows the significant correlations between Morrison corpus and Reference corpus in terms of sentence length,readability and key four-word clusters.For the sentence,in general mean sentence length of Morrison's novels is much lower than that of Reference corpus,and over half of sentences in Morrison corpus are short sentences.This can demonstrate that expression of Morrison's novels is concise and informative.As to readability,it shows that in general Morrison's novels have much higher Flesch read ease score than Reference corpus,indicating that Morrison's novels are less difficult to understand than Reference corpus.Moreover,it demonstrates Morrison's strategies of using speech clusters,negation clusters,it/there clusters,and time and place clusters.Speech clusters that are expressive illocutionary acts are used for portraying the character's personality and events.Negation clusters contains grammatical negatives and verbs of modality and mental processing and are used for portraying characters' inner thoughts and states and forming the narrative progression.As to it/there clusters,they are used for denoting the objective narrative voice,and time and place clusters are mostly used for depicting the characters' emotional conflicts and increasing the tension of the plot.