Corpus Stylistic Analysis of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs

Abstract

This paper aims to employ one of the corpus stylistic methods to analyze Thomas Harris's novel, The Silence of the Lambs. Recently, technology has invaded our lives. To put it differently, researchers depend highly on computers to access and gain information about certain data. Thus, it is crucial to keep up with the up-to-date developments concerning computational methodologies and toolkits. Corpus stylistics helps to find certain features that cannot be understood without using the techniques of computers. In order to achieve this goal, a quantitative and qualitative methodology is applied. Corpus stylistics helps to analyze lengthy texts more efficiently. This is not to say that it substitutes the manual stylistic one. In fact, both the corpus and manual stylistic analyses work hand in glove, and they complement each other. The tool that is used to conduct the analysis by examining keywords and key semantic domains is Wmatrix3. In addition to the previous tool, AntConc is a complementary tool to investigate n- grams in the novel and to point out their significance to the overall interpretation.