Narrative Progression in the Short Story

A corpus stylistic approach
Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-90-272-3338-7
Verlag: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Buch, Englisch, Band 6, 212 Seiten, Format (B × H): 164 mm x 245 mm, Gewicht: 560 g

Reihe: Linguistic Approaches to Literature

One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book proposes that a matrix of narrativity-furthering textual features is crucial to the reader’s forming of expectations about how a literary story will continue to its close. Toolan uses corpus linguistic software and methods, and stylistic and narratological theory, in the course of delineating the matrix of eight parameters that he sees as crucial to creating narrative progression and expectation. The book will be of interest to stylisticians, narratologists, corpus linguists, and short story scholars.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Toolan, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Textlinguistik, Diskursanalyse, Stilistik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Computerlinguistik, Korpuslinguistik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
List of figures and tables
Chapter 1. Introduction: Narrative prospecting
Chapter 2. Collocation and corpus stylistics
Chapter 3. Lexical patternings in short stories
Chapter 4. Top keyword sentences as story waymarking
Chapter 5. Keywords and the language of guidance in "The Love of a Good Woman"
Chapter 6. Repetition and para-repetition in story structure
Chapter 7. Prospection and expectation: Core signalling
Chapter 8. Prospection and expectation: Embedded signalling
Chapter 9. The textual tracking of suspense and surprise.
Chapter 10. Next steps
References
Name index
Topic index