Corpus Stylistic Analysis Of British Gothic Fiction

Based on the comparison and analysis of the keywords and phraseology extracted from the two corpora - "British Gothic Corpus" and "18-19th Century British Novel Corpus", this thesis aims to make a tentative exploration on the corpus stylistic features of British Gothic Fiction, namely to study the genre from a linguistic perspective which is enlightening as it shows how these Gothic features reveal themselves through language.The thesis first introduces the research background and the objective of the thesis itself-to discover the stylistic features of the genre through its keywords and phraseology. Then the relevant literature is reviewed, providing the cohesion of the studies in the fields of literary analysis of British Gothic Fiction and the development of corpus stylistics. The thesis also depicts the theoretical framework of the study, namely the relationship between language and meaning.The core of the whole thesis is to analyze the extracted data in the two corpora and is further divided into two parts in which keywords and phraseology are studied respectively. The keywords extracted from the relevant corpora are analyzed according to their semantic fields, thus revealing the typical features of British Gothic Fiction from the following aspects:gothic region, gothic space and gothic characters, all of which contribute to the creation of a horrifying atmosphere, which is always referred as "gothic horror". The phraseology, in particular the 4-grams and 4-frames in British Gothic Fiction are analyzed, including:the study of the 4-grams from the perspective of semantic fields as well as the study of the slot features of all the 4-frames involved. This part identifies the stylistic features of phraseology in British Gothic Fiction and to find out the reasons and implications of those features in a hope to deepen readers’understanding of British Gothic Fiction and to promote further development of corpus stylistics in the field of literature.The significance of the study is that firstly it is a tentative exploration on the corpus stylistic features of a whole literary genre, which has seldom been studied in the previous research. Secondly, the study, compared with traditional intuition-based research, can provide more objective evidence for literary analysis as it is based on empirical data. The major benefit of using corpus linguistics as the methodology in stylistic study in combination with traditional literary analysis also lies in the fact that it can provide quantitative evidence for more qualitative stylistic analyses. And the evidence may be a similar indication to those from traditional analyses and may provide new insights into the genre of British Gothic Fiction. Thirdly the study can help to develop the new interdisciplinary methodology so that it can be adapted to the analysis of other texts and corpora, thus giving new vitality to literature criticism as well as corpus linguistics. Meanwhile, it also points out the limitations of the study as well as suggestions for future research.