A Corpus Stylistic Study Of Philip Roth’s American Trilogy

Philip Roth(1933-2018)is one of the famous contemporary writers and one of the outstanding representatives of Jewish writers in America.American Trilogy novels are his representative works.The trilogy includes American Pastoral(1997),I married a Communist(1998)and The Human stain 2000).American Trilogy novels are literary works that have a powerful look at postwar American society.Although there are lots of researches about American Trilogy at present,studies of the trilogy from a linguistic perspective are rare.Corpus stylistics is an emerging linguistic theory that applies corpus linguistic research method to the traditional literary analysis.Corpus stylistics realizes the combination of qualitative research and quantitative research,provides empirical support for subjective literary interpretation.It makes the analysis results more objective and reliable and also provides a new perspective for research.In this thesis,based on the analysis of keywords of observed corpus(American Trilogy)against reference corpus(Roth’s other novels),it is found that there is significant difference between American Trilogy and Roth’s other novels.By further analyzing these keywords,it is concluded that:(1)the topic of American Trilogy mainly focuses on family relationship(the relationship between father and daughter;(2)American historical events are set as the story background of American Trilogy,which gives the trilogy a strong sense of contemporaneity;(3)Roth uses the combination of external-focus narration and internal-focus narration in American Trilogy and mainly narrates in third-person with dialogues.Except that,the author analyzes American Trilogy from three levels compared with Roth’s other novels.The results present that:(1)at lexical level,in American Trilogy,lexical variety,lexical density and information carried by vocabulary are higher,and comprehensibility is lower;(2)at syntactic level,sentences used in American Trilogy are more complex but less discrete,and texts are more fluent;(3)at textual level,Roth is good at using punctuation skillfully,the text fragmentation is lower and the text style is more formal.In summary,the analysis of Roth’s American Trilogy from lexis,syntax and text by usingcorpus stylistics is conducive to exploring and verifying stylistic features of the trilogy.It is of some significance in deepening readers’ understanding,filling the research gap and enriching the research achievements of the trilogy.