A Corpus Stylistic Study Of Features Of Thomas Hardy’s "Character And Environment" Novels

Thomas Hardy is an English novelist and poet. Hardy divided his novels into three types, namely, "Character and Environment", "Romances and Fantasies" and "Novels of Ingenuity". Hardy is famous for his novels of the first type and these novels can be called his representative work.Corpus stylistics is a relatively new area of study and offers us a new way to look at the literary works. Many researchers take advantage of corpus linguistics to analyze the theme or the style of a literary work. This thesis will use the corpus linguistics method which combines quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the characteristics of Hardy’s "Character and Environment" novels and distinguish them from those of the other two types of Hardy’s novels as well as those of the novels written by his contemporary writers.Based on the comparison and analysis of the keywords extracted from the three corpora-Hardy’s "Character and Environment" novels corpus, Hardy’s other two type novels corpus and the contemporary literature corpus, the present thesis adopts the keywords method and tries to verify the conclusions about the features of the novels of "Character and Environment" through dividing the keywords into different semantic fields. This thesis also tries to explore some new features of Hardy’s "Character and Environment" novels. Another aim of this thesis is to identify the stylistic features of Hardy’s "Character and Environment" novels and to find out the reasons and implications of those features in a hope to deepen readers’understanding of this type of novels and to promote further development of corpus stylistic study in the field of literature.The results show that the vocabulary used in "Character and Environment" novels is more varied and the word length is shorter. In addition, some features in "Character and Environment" novels can be identified, i.e. a. the stories mostly happen in the countryside of England since there are a lot of descriptions of scenes in daily life and farmers play a key role in this kind of novels; b. the descriptions of country life is vivid; c. the descriptions of natural environment account for a large part in this kind of novels, especially the descriptions of trees; d. animals have the emotions that human-beings have, and in turn, human-beings have sympathy for animals and care about animals; and e. the plots of the stories tend to develop around three time points, "tonight", "today" and "Sunday". Furthermore,1/3 of the nouns in the keyword list are used to describe natural environment, therefore, the features of "Environment" can be identified while the feature of "Character" could not be found through the keyword list.