Article published in:

Scientific Approaches to Literature in Learning Environments
Edited by Michael Burke, Olivia Fialho and Sonia Zyngier
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 24] 2016
► pp. 253–270

Chapter 13. Point and CLiC

Teaching literature with corpus stylistic tools

Michaela Mahlberg | University of Birmingham

Peter Stockwell | University of Nottingham

This chapter looks at the corpus tool CLiC, a web application specifically designed for the study of literary texts. It allows students to run concordances or generate keywords, for instance. It gives students the opportunity to work with a corpus of Dickens novels, but also with novels by other nineteenth century authors. Unlike more general corpus tools, CLiC enables searches that help to address research questions particular to literary texts. We investigate the question as to what kind of corpus exercises can be designed to help students understand the variety of opportunities that corpus approaches to literary texts offer. We deal with issues of frequency, but also with links between concepts in literary linguistics and corpus linguistics, specifically characterization and mind-modelling. We focus on examples from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist for an illustrative case-study.

Keywords: suspensions, characterization, mind-modelling, corpus tools, corpus stylistics, clusters, concordances

Published online: 22 July 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.24.13mah

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