An Integrated Study of Small-Corpus-Based Stylistics and the Theory of Meaning

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This study develops effectiveness and validity of the small-corpus-based approach combined with the non-corpus-based. The small-corpus-based approach mainly treats the concrete results of the author's writing, but cannot fathom causes or processes leading to the results. For example in the article, 'A Small-Corpus Based Approach to Alice's Roles' adopted in Literary and Linguistic Computing, collocation data for Alice serve well to retrieve how Alice is described in terms of modifiers and how she speaks in terms of adverbials, but regrettably what Alice is called by others. The corpus-based quantitative approach, in other words, deals with 'reference' while 'sense' should be grasped through textual interpretation or sometimes inferred processing. This qualitative approach requires comprehensive studies in stylistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and relevance theory, which leads to a new theory of meaning.An integrated study of two different approaches collaborated contributes to the elucidation of the extrinsic and intrinsic value of literary works. The study exhibits one of concrete procedures for stylistic research with small corpus processing, which provides 'more systematic evidence for unavoidable subjective interpretation' as in Stubbs (2005 : 22).