A Corpus-based Stylistic Study On Alice Munro’s Works

Alice Munro, a prestigious Canadian short story writer, won the Nobel Prize inLiterature Prize in2013. Her acute insight and attentiveness towards ordinary lifegained popularity in literary world, and she was called “Chekhov of Canada”. In hersixty years’ writing career, she had published fourteen short story collections and onenovel, and won Governor General’s Literary Award—Canada’s highest prize inliterature for three times. At the same time, her works had been translated into13languages, which were spoken highly of by a global audience and the media.Runaway, one of the representative works of Monroe, won the Man BookerInternational Prize in2009. Though scholars from the home and aboard conductplenty of studies on Runaway, neither of them focus on the corpus stylistics approach.Based on the corpus approach, this paper aims to study the stylistic feature ofRunaway—a novel of the same name selected from the collection of Runaway. Thisthesis conducts a systematic stylistic analysis of Runaway from the following threelevels: lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level.In order to achieve the goal, an observed corpus and a reference corpus are bothbuilt. The observed corpus is the electronic text of Runaway, while the referencecorpus consists of the eight electronic texts of the twentieth century American novels.In this research, three softwares, AntConc, WordSmith Tools and UAM CorpusTool,are applied. The findings are as follows: firstly, the language in Runaway has a lessvariety of vocabulary, shorter average word length and sentence length. Secondly,though the analysis of the top20frequent-used keywords, we can get some basicinformation about the novel. As for the four major characters, Carla is theheroine—the most important character, while Jamieson is the least importantcharacter in the novel; The novel is mainly told in the past tense; The novel is toldwith the third person narrative voice; The novel contains abundant dialogues. Thirdly,compared with the reference corpus, the sentences used in the observed corpus is lesscomplexity due to the less application of coordination and subordinate clauses.Fourthly, personal pronouns in Runaway and the reference corpus both stay relativelyhigh. However, more of the adverbial connectors are used in Runaway than thereference corpus. Personal pronouns and adverbial connectors applied in Runawayenhance the cohesion of text and also contribute to the smooth flow of storytelling.