Language and Literature. a Corpus Stylistic Approach to Charles Dickens

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Osnabrück, language: English, abstract: Early Corpus linguistics and stylistics began with Chomsky's approach to language. He explicitly stated that there are three levels of adequacy upon which grammatical and linguistic theories can be evaluated: observational adequacy, descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy . This "revolution" through Chomsky founded the basis for corpus-based analysis, a method which uses adequate examples to give introspection how a language works and how it is used by different authors. Corpus-based analysis offers new insights into studies of language and new computer tools and software make it possible to get access to a wide range of electronic corpora. In my research paper I will carry out a corpus stylistic approach to the language of 19th century author Charles Dickens. This means that I will basically focus on his special register and investigate his use of particular clusters as recurrent combinations of words used in his corpus. Furthermore, I will focus on A Christmas Carol (1843) as an exemplifying novel of how language patterns are used by Dickens. This masterpiece has the smallest number of words of all his novels, namely 28.541, which renders it a special challenge to analyse. Moreover, it hasn't been analysed by many corpus linguists before which puts A Christmas Carol in the light of a nearly unexamined piece of art ready to explore. My thesis which will be developed in the following chapters would be that Dickens's novels, especially A Christmas Carol, provide a unit of meaning, their own worlds of text, in which Dickens's unique style can be sifted out, providing recurring clusters which offer a corpus work based on effective comparison. To enter the deep analysis to provide a well-worked out research paper I will start with a description and findings of corpus analysis. Secondly, I will spen