Narrative Progression in the Short Story
A corpus stylistic approach
University of Birmingham
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.
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 6]
2009.
xi, 212 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound – Available
ISBN
9789027233387
|
EUR
99.00
|
USD
149.00
Paperback – Available
ISBN
9789027233431
|
EUR
33.00
|
USD
49.95
e-Book – Sold by e-book platforms
ISBN
9789027290618
|
EUR
99.00
|
USD
149.00
Google Edition – Forthcoming
ISBN
9789027290618
|
EUR
33.00
|
USD
49.95
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements
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ix–x
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List of figures and tables
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xi
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Chapter 1. Introduction: Narrative prospecting
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1–13
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Chapter 2. Collocation and corpus stylistics
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15–30
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Chapter 3. Lexical patternings in short stories
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31–51
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Chapter 4. Top keyword sentences as story waymarking
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53–76
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Chapter 5. Keywords and the language of guidance in "The Love of a Good Woman"
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77–95
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Chapter 6. Repetition and para-repetition in story structure
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97–112
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Chapter 7. Prospection and expectation: Core signalling
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113–133
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Chapter 8. Prospection and expectation: Embedded signalling
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135–164
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Chapter 9. The textual tracking of suspense and surprise.
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165–188
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Chapter 10. Next steps
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189–200
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References
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201–208
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Name index
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209
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Topic index
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211–212
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Quotes
“With this book, Toolan offers a valuable contribution to the field of corpus stylistics. It is a dense work that is probably not aimed at novices, but is of interest to researchers with at least some background knowledge of corpus tools and/or narratology. It should persuade at least some readers that using tools from corpus linguistics can benefit and expand literary studies, both in terms of speeding up text processing, as well as by raising new and important questions about narrative progression and narratology more generally. Toolan's stance is moderate and sensible: he does not consider corpus tools as the be-all and end-all, but equally emphasises the role of the human analyst in evaluating electronic data.”
Marlies Gabriele Prinzl, University College London, on Linguist List 22.1500, 2011
Subjects
Benjamins Subject classification
BIC Subject
CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
BISAC Subject
LAN015000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Rhetoric
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 2008044245