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Part of
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

ORCID logo | University of Birmingham
ORCID logo | 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: characterization, clusters, concordances, corpus stylistics, corpus tools, mind-modelling, suspensions
Published online: 22 July 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.24.13mah
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Cushing, Ian
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2020. Fiction – one register or two?. Register Studies 2:1 ► pp. 72 ff. DOI logo
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Mahlberg, Michaela, Peter Stockwell, Johan de Joode, Catherine Smith & Matthew Brook O'Donnell
2016. CLiC Dickens: novel uses of concordances for the integration of corpus stylistics and cognitive poetics. Corpora 11:3 ► pp. 433 ff. DOI logo
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2019. Speech-bundles in the 19th-century English novel. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 28:4 ► pp. 326 ff. DOI logo
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