A Corpus Stylistic Analysis of Speech and Thought Presentation in James Joyce’s Dubliners

Abstract

The present article attempts to analyze the interaction between categories of speech and thought in James Joyce’s Dubliners quantitatively and qualitatively by applying Leech and Short Model (1981/2007). Excerpts of 2000-word length have been randomly selected and manually tagged to have the accurate annotation keeping in mind the contextual potential to recognize discourse categories in Joyce fiction and then corpus software AntConc (Laurence Anthony 2018) was used to get quantitative results. The present study is grounded within three separate but interrelated disciplines: Stylistics, Discourse Analysis, and Narratology. It is difficult to imagine an example of a narrative that does not contain a reference to or a quotation of someone’s speech or thoughts. To a large extent, the way we perceive a story depends upon the ways discourse is presented. This is something hard to demarcate the boundaries between them as the various modes have the potential to slip into one another. Special emphasis is given to variations between the three modes as well as to the instances of ambiguity created by their interplay. The article also compares findings with those described in Semino and Short (2004) for their corpus of 20th-century narrative fiction.

Keywords:Corpus Stylistics, speech presentation, thought presentation, Leech and Short Model

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/81-05

Publication date:August 31^st 2021