A Corpus-Based Study On The Stylistic Features Of Beloved

Beloved was first published in 1987 and widely recognized as one of the most popular masterpieces of Toni Morrison.Beloved centers on the bitterness of the entire black nation through narrating joys and sorrows of a typical black family.Its profound historical feelings and compassionate religious redemption touch the most tender and fragile part of American society,which wins the universal recognition of western literary world.Though fruitful results on the study of Beloved have been harvested from different theoretical perspectives of stylistics,the great literature value of Beloved and creative talent of Morrison still remain to be further explored due to the limitations in the previous researches adopting the qualitative paradigm.By the 20 th century,with the aid of computers,the construction of various corpora and researches based on corpora have made great progress,accelerating the rising of corpus linguistics.The combination of corpus linguistics and traditional stylistics opens up the new field of research—Corpus Stylistics.After 1980 s,within only ten short years,corpus-based literary studies gradually become the mainstream in the world of literary criticism.The rapid development of corpus linguistics brings the broad prospect for the researches of literary criticism and stylistics.Inspired by previous researches,this study annotates and retrieves two self-built literary corpora for comparison,then making and extracting a series of language data related to the stylistic features of fictions in two literary corpora.The major findings of this research are as follows:At the lexical level,words in Beloved are brief and short,and the value of its lexical density is little higher than that of The reference corpus,and its repetition rate is lower,which indicates that Beloved has the rich and complicated story plots,being endowed with profound historical cultures and deep national sentiments of American blacks.At the syntactic level,average sentence length in Beloved is far shorter than that of The reference corpus,highlighting its colloquial style.Its high-frequency word clusters present the negative semantic prosody,creating the distorted real and spiritual world of the characters.At the level of context and cohesion,Beloved uses much morethird personal pronouns,which creates the marginalized and sentimental narration.Fewer cohesive devices in Beloved develop fragmented story plots and depressive narrative habit.At the level of figures of speech,Morrison portrays black slaves as various images of plants and animals,which reveals their low social status and miserable destiny.This study has shown that methods and techniques advocated by corpus linguistics have the incomparable advantages than traditional approaches,creating the potential possibilities for making the comparative study of novels independently by any a researcher.However,the language data itself cannot directly unveil the answers,the explanation of meaning of data depends on researchers' knowledge and practice of literary stylistics.As a consequence,future researchers are encouraged to take full advantage of corpus approach to put forward more original and creative ideas.