Corpus-based Literary Interpretation Of Hemingway’s Novels

This dissertation intends to expand the application scope of corpus linguisticsfrom language acquisition and translation to literary interpretation. Based onlarge-size corpora and corpus analysis softwares, this study adopts a quantitative andobjective approach so as to complement the subjectivity of literary criticism. Thisthesis aims to achieve three goals:1) to demonstrate the usefulness of corpuslinguistic techniques in a stylistic analysis of literary texts and corpora;2) to gainstylistic and literary insights into the data collected from Hemingway novels with thehelp of corpus linguistic techniques; and3) to explore the potential of the techniquesused in the analyses so that they can be adapted to future analysis of literary texts andcorpora.To arrive at these goals, this dissertation begins with the exploration of the originand development of corpus stylistics, which is an interdisciplinary field betweencorpus linguistics and stylistics, so as to establish the theoretical foundation for thequantitative study of the language of literary works. Then, three approaches have beentaken to analyze Hemingway’s four major novels with corpus linguistic techniques.Firstly, several corpora have been established and compared among each otherthrough WordSmith Tools, a corpus software, so as to extract keywords out of each ofthe four Hemingway major novels. These keywords are grouped by the standard ofgrammatical divisions. Then, they are further analyzed so that Hemingway’s personalpreferences for different parts of speech are discovered, such as simple verbs, rareusage of adjectives and two successive prepositions.Secondly, patterns of phrases in the four novels are extracted through anothersoftware kfNgram, including spatial relationships, verbal phrases, personal pronouns,grammatical negations, etc. Compared with the patterns in Hemingway’scontemporary literary works, some characteristics conveyed by the phrases are foundto be Hemingway’s idiolect.Finally, those keywords are divided again by semantic categorization intovarious themes in the four novels, for instance, the “apprentice” and the “exemplar”, attitude toward war, death and religion. Based on these themes, concordance lines ofthe keywords as node words are examined in details and the protagonists and thethemes in the four novels are compared and discussed. It has been discovered thatHemingway did have certain modifications in the characterization, but there were nobig changes in the themes, such as anti-war stance and religious elements. Thus,traditional literary interpretations of these novels and Hemingway’s style of icebergprinciple have been partially proved.The study has resulted in a few achievements. Theoretically, it has explored thepossibility of the interdisciplinary interface between corpus linguistics and literarycriticism. Practically, corpora of literary texts have been founded and the fourHemingway major novels have been diachronically studied and some new insightshave been gained:1) Hemingway has a tendency to use two prepositions together;2)Catherine plays the role of the exemplary hero in the novel A Farewell to Arms;3)The novel The Old Man and the Sea is very different from the other three novels. Forexample, the protagonist is the exemplar instead of the apprentice; what the old mansaid did mean what he thought, and the sun used as a symbol may echo the name ofHemingway’s first major novel The Sun Also Rises.