ABSTRACT
Corpus stylistics, an emerging interdisciplinary field combining corpus linguistics and stylistics, is the scientific study of a writer’s style using corpus tools and statistical techniques (cf. Mahlberg, 2012). Corpus stylistics draws on the analytic framework of stylistics and the tools and methodologies of corpus linguistics. It seeks to identify patterns of linguistic forms and their literary meanings. Such an approach has the potential advantages of shedding light on literary interpretations, which are often implicit or elusive in texts. Over the years, corpus linguistics has developed tools and methods for the retrieval and analysis of linguistic patterns associated with meanings (cf. Stubbs, 1996; Biber and Concrad, 1999; McEnery and Hardy, 2012). Many of these methodologies are also applicable to corpus stylistics. Mahlberg (2010), for example, introduces corpus methods to approach literary works using keywords and repeated patterns. Mahlberg (2012) and Balossi (2014) address the styles of Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf respectively using repeated sequences, syntactic as well as semantic tags.
