Corpus Stylistics

Corpus Stylistics

Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing

By Elena Semino, Mick Short

Published 1st September 2011 by Routledge – 272 pages

Series: Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics

This book combines stylistic analysis with corpus linguistics to present an innovative account of the phenomenon of speech, writing and thought presentation - commonly referred to as 'speech reporting' or 'discourse presentation'.

This new account is based on an extensive analysis of a quarter-of-a-million word electronic collection of written narrative texts, including both fiction and non-fiction. The book includes detailed discussions of:

• The construction of this corpus of late twentieth-century written British narratives taken from fiction, newspaper news reports and (auto)biographies
• The development of a manual annotation system for speech, writing and thought presentation and its application to the corpus.
• The findings of a quantitive and qualitative analysis of the forms and functions of speech, writing and thought presentation in the three genres represented in the corpus.
• The findings of the analysis of a range of specific phenomena, including hypothetical speech, writing and thought presentation, embedded speech, writing and thought presentation and ambiguities in speech, writing and thought presentation.
• Two case studies concentrating on specific texts from the corpus.

Corpus Stylistics shows how stylistics, and text/discourse analysis more generally, can benefit from the use of a corpus methodology and the authors' innovative approach results in a more reliable and comprehensive categorisation of the forms of speech, writing and thought presentation than have been suggested so far. This book is essential reading for linguists interested in the areas of stylistics and corpus linguistics.