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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 23:3 (2018) ► pp.279–310

The creative use of absences

A corpus stylistic approach to Henry Green’s Living

| University of Granada

In an article published in this journal, Partington (2014) addresses the criticism often made against corpus linguistics that it is apparently unable to cope with absences. He convincingly argues that corpus linguistics is better suited to account for absences than has been claimed. I resume the debate by discussing a type of absence not fully addressed in Partington (2014) which I have termed ‘creative absences’. With a focus on corpus stylistics, I consider the way in which the author Henry Green dispenses with a compulsory element in the grammatical structure of Standard English, i.e. the determiner (mainly, the definite article). By means of a manual analysis as well as two corpus stylistic analyses (keyness and text-type analysis) of the novel Living (Green 1929), I explore the effects of such an unorthodox use and argue, alongside Partington (2014), for the usefulness of corpus approaches to account for at least certain types of absences.

Keywords: absences, corpus stylistics, keyness, text type, methodological triangulation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Henry Green’s Living and his theory of art
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results of accounting for absences manually
  • 5.Results of corpus-assisted analyses
    • 5.1Underused tags: Wmatrix analysis
    • 5.2Multidimensional functional analysis of Living: MAT
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 October 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17035.mon
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