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English Text Construction
Vol. 10:1 (2017) ► pp.78–105
article

Key words and translated cohesion in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and one of its Italian translations

| University of Birmingham |
| University of Birmingham |

In this paper, we explore the potential of a corpus approach to study translated cohesion. We use key words as starting points for identifying cohesive networks in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and discuss how these networks contribute to the construction of literary meanings in the text. We focus on the role of repetition as a key element in establishing cohesive networks between lexical items. We specifically discuss the implications of our method for the analysis of cohesion in translated texts. A comparison of Lovecraft’s original novel and a translation into Italian provides us with a nuanced understanding of the complex nature of cohesive networks. Finally, we discuss the broader issue of applying models and methods from corpus linguistics to corpus stylistic analysis.

Keywords: cohesive networks, key words, corpus stylistics, literary translation, Lovecraft
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus stylistics, cohesion and literary translation
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1 Mountains, peaks, and foothills: The fictional representation of the Antarctic mountains
    • 4.2Semantic preference and semantic prosody: “Height” and “Mysteriousness”
    • 4.3The cohesive networks
  • 5.The cohesive networks in translation
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 15 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.10.1.05mas
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