A Corpus Stylistic Study Of Theodore Dreiser’s Novels

Corpus stylistics is the combination of stylistic research and corpus linguistics, which provides an entirely new perspective for linguistic analysis of literary works. It aims to analyze the stylistic features in literary texts objectively and quantitatively by means of corpus techniques and statistical methods. With the aid of corpora, it can disclose some valuable stylistic information hidden in literary texts and therefore make useful contributions to literary criticism and stylistic research.Theodore Dreiser is a famous American writer in the 20th century. His works make a realistic description of life conditions of all classes in the United States in his time, expose and criticize the darkness of the capitalist society as well as the impact of the American money-worship life mode on people’s universal and criminal corrosion. Numerous literary studies on Dreiser’s fiction have been done; however,very few,if not no,studies have adopted a quantitative method to analyze his fictional works from the corpus stylistic perspective. This study takes three corpus linguistic principles as the theoretical foundations for corpus stylistics, i.e. language as a social phenomenon, the equivalence between frequency and significance, and the unity of form and meaning. It analyzes Dreiser ’s fiction on the basis of two corpora: the Dreiser Corpus containing 6 novels and one story collections by Dreiser and the 20th century Corpus consisting of 13 novels by other American writers in his time. It employs the KeyWords function in WordSmith Tools 4.0 to retrieve the data, and focuses on keywords and four-word key clusters, aiming to address the following two questions: (1) What are the stylistic features in terms of the use of four-word clusters in Dreiser’s fiction? (2) What are the stylistic features of word use in his fiction?The research results show that,compared with his contemporaries,Dreiser tends to use significantly more Modality and Mental Processing clusters, Speech clusters, Complex Preposition clusters, Negation clusters, emotion words, mental words, evaluative words and intensifiers. This study also makes a comparison with Mahlberg’s (2007) study on Dickens’s fiction, and the results reveal that unlike Dickens, Dreiser is much less likely to use Body Part clusters and As If clusters to contextualize and highlight what is being described and create characters in an indirect manner; instead, he prefers to use emotion or mental words (clusters) to describe the emotional or mental states for characterization.