A ROUGH GUIDE TO DOING CORPUS STYLISTICS

Abstract

This article has two main purposes. The first is to provide a short panorama of existing trends within computer-assisted stylistics. The second is to analyse a prize winning novel by English writer Julian Barnes, by resorting to the tenets and working tools of one of the newest branch of Stylistics, the so-called Corpus stylistics. To this end, the article starts by looking at various attempts at defining what style is and their implications to the definition of the discipline known as Stylistics. Then the paper presents recent work within the field of Corpus stylistics, as it describes the uses of computational tools as part of the stylistician tool kit. Finally, the paper provides a variety of ways with which a literary work may be approached digitally with a view to showing how computational tools can aid the stylistician in acts of interpretation.