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

by Semino,Elena

• ISBN13: 9780415286695
• ISBN10: 0415286697
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-24
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book represents a new direction at the interface between the fields of stylistics and corpus linguistics, namely the use of a corpus methodology to investigate the ways in which people's words and thoughts are presented in written narratives. A 260,000 word electronic corpus of late 20th century written texts, including fiction, news reports and (auto)biographies is analysed by the authors, providing a detailed account of new theoretical insights, comparisons between different text types and detailed accounts of individual texts.

Author Biography

Elena Semino is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University.

Table of Contents

List of figures	viii
List of tables	ix
Acknowledgements	xi
1 Introduction: a corpus-based approach to the study of discourse presentation in written narratives	1	(18)
1.1 Introduction	1	(3)
1.2 Why a corpus-based approach?	4	(5)
1.3 The Leech and Short (1981) model	9	(7)
1.4 Other corpus based approaches to speech, writing and thought presentation	16	(1)
1.5 The structure of this book	17	(2)
2 Methodology: the construction and annotation of the corpus	19	(23)
2.1 The corpus	19	(7)
2.2 The annotation system	26	(13)
2.3 Concluding remarks	39	(3)
3 A revised model of speech, writing and thought presentation	42	(24)
3.1 New categories and a new presentational scale	42	(10)
3.2 New sub-categories	52	(5)
3.3 An overview of speech, writing and thought presentation in the corpus	57	(7)
3.4 Concluding remarks	64	(2)
4 Speech presentation in the corpus: a quantitative and qualitative analysis	66	(32)
4.1 Introduction	66	(1)
4.2 The speech presentation categories in the corpus	66	(30)
4.3 Concluding remarks	96	(2)
5 Writing presentation in the corpus: a quantitative and qualitative analysis	98	(16)
5.1 Introduction	98	(1)
5.2 The writing presentation categories in the corpus	98	(13)
5.3 Concluding remarks	111	(3)
6 Thought presentation in the corpus: a quantitative and qualitative analysis	114	(39)
6.1 Introduction	114	(2)
6.2 The pure thought presentation categories in the corpus	116	(19)
6.3 Inferred thought presentation in the corpus	135	(12)
6.4 Concluding remarks	147	(2)
6.5 An overview of our findings on the major speech, writing and thought presentation categories	149	(4)
7 Specific phenomena in speech, writing and thought presentation	153	(48)
7.1 Quotation phenomena	153	(6)
7.2 Hypothetical speech, writing and thought presentation	159	(12)
7.3 Embedded speech, writing and thought presentation	171	(11)
7.4 Ambiguity in speech, writing and thought presentation	182	(16)
7.5 Concluding remarks	198	(3)
8 Case studies of specific texts from the corpus	201	(21)
8.1 Introduction	201	(1)
8.2 Is the medium the message? The presentation of conversations with the dead in Joyful Voices by Doris Stokes	202	(8)
8.3 Discourse presentation in newspaper reports of a 'PC Bible' story	210	(12)
9 Conclusion	222	(10)
9.1 Our findings and the corpus approach	222	(5)
9.2 Areas where further research is needed	227	(5)
Appendix 1 List of texts sampled	232	(3)
Appendix 2 The SW&TP tagset	235	(2)
Appendix 3 Alphabetical list of reporting verbs for Indirect Speech presentation	237	(2)
Appendix 4 Alphabetical list of reporting verbs for Direct Speech presentation	239	(3)
Appendix 5 Alphabetical list of reporting verbs for Indirect Writing presentation	242	(1)
Appendix 6 Alphabetical list of reporting verbs for Direct Writing presentation	243	(1)
Appendix 7 Alphabetical list of reporting verbs for Direct Thought presentation	244	(1)
Appendix 8 Alphabetical list of reporting verbs for Indirect Thought presentation	245	(1)
Bibliography	246	(5)
Index	251