A theoretical and practical guide to using corpus linguistic
techniques in stylistic analysis
The use of corpora in stylistics has increased substantially in recent
years but until now there has been no book detailing the theoretical
basis and methodological practices of corpus stylistics. This book
surveys the field and sets the agenda for this fast-developing area.
Focusing on how to use off-the-shelf corpus software, such as AntConc,
Wmatrix, and the Brigham Young University (BYU) corpus interface, this
step-by-step guide explains the theory and practice of using corpus
methods and tools for stylistic analysis. Eight original case studies
demonstrate how to use corpus tools to analyse style in a range of
texts, from the contemporary to the historical. McIntyre and Walker
explain how to develop appropriate research questions for corpus
stylistic analysis, construct and annotate corpora, make sense of
statistics, and analyse corpus data. In addition, the book provides
practical advice on how to manage the transition from quantitative
results to qualitative analysis, and explores how theories, models and
frameworks from stylistics can be used to enhance the qualitative phase
of corpus analysis. Supported by detailed instructions on how to access
and use relevant corpus software, this is a user's guide to doing corpus
stylistic analysis. For students and researchers in stylistics new to
the use of corpus methods and theories, the book presents a 'how-to'
guide; for corpus linguists it opens the door to the theories, models
and frameworks developed in stylistics that are of value to mainstream
corpus linguistics.
