‘Towards an Integrated Corpus Stylistics’, by Dan McIntyre

McIntyre, Dan. ‘Towards an Integrated Corpus Stylistics’. Topics in Linguistics, issue 16 (December 2015), 59–68. doi:10.2478/topling-2015-0011

Are there angels singing? Or is it just in my head?

Where has this article been hiding all this time?!

McIntyre offers an insightful approach to the two strands of stylistics that have become most prevalent in stylistics since the 1990s. Most significantly, to me: it clearly describes the position that I have taken myself, in a much more articulate and clearly thought-out manner than what I have done so far.

McIntyre argues that ‘cognitive stylistics’ has been defined infelicitously, and that if the term is to have any value, we need to change the way we think about what corpus stylistics is, specifically by integrating it with other stylistic methods, especially cognitive stylistics.

Summer Reading List: 2017

It’s already been a very busy summer, with a symposium and and a paper/roundtable/reception during the Leeds IMC behind me. I leave in the next few days to attend a conference in Pennsylvania (where I will be presenting again) and then to visit my family. I’ll be gone for about 3 1/2 weeks altogether, and I’m taking some reading with me!

Symposium: Approaching the Historical

I’m very pleased to announce that I am co-organizing a symposium on stylistic approaches to Old, Middle, and Early Modern English texts. The one-day symposium, titled ‘Approaching the Historical’, will be held at the University of Nottingham in June 2017.

The CFP is currently open (the deadline has been extended to 17 March), and registration will open in April. Registration is free, due to the generous support of CRAL (the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham) and PALA (the Poetics and Linguistics Association). So even if you are not submitting an abstract, please do consider joining us, as it promises to be an interesting day.

Full details can be found on the website, historicalstylistics.wordpress.com.

things I didn’t expect for my PhD

If I’ve learned anything as a PhD student, it’s that I did not really know what to expect. Sure, I expected to spend loads of time reading, researching, and writing. I expected to get a little bit sick of my research topic. I expected to do some teaching and some presenting at conferences. And all of those have been true. But there have been several things about my work that I didn’t really see coming. Here are some of them.

Prototypicality and Characterization

I have recently been working my way through Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics, reminding myself of some core concepts to the field (and trying to ensure that my own research is grounded in these concepts). This week I read chapter 3, ‘Prototypes and reading’. At the end of the chapter, Stockwell suggests applying prototypicality theory to various areas of language use, and I decided to take him on this by applying it to characterization (which is, after all, one of the areas he suggests).

on the Old Testament in early Anglo-Saxon England

“In the various letters […] written to or about Boniface from correspondents in England, Old Testament allusions are many but direct citations are unfortunately few. Such as they are, however, they confirm the availability of excellent Vulgate texts in various southern monasteries involved, and the competence of the correspondents to use them accurately and intelligently.”

Toolan’s 11 foundational principles of stylistics

In his chapter of The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, titled “The Theory and Philosophy of Stylistics,” Michael Toolan provided 11 principles that are foundational to stylistics. These are the ideas and facts that undergird the practice of stylistics, that affect our ideas about what stylistics is, why it is useful, what it can (and cannot) do, and its relationship to related disciplines (such as linguistics and literary criticism). Here, I present these 11 principles, in my own words.

best part of Day 3 at PALA 2015

Someone asked me today if I was Catherine Emmott. It was pure mistake—but it was still the best moment of the whole day! 🙂

on rigor in stylistics

“Stylistics has never been objective, definitive and rigorous along the lines of experimental sciences. It couldn’t be—not simply because literary texts are variously contextualised and variously interpreted, but because language is endlessly potentially variable in forms and functions, languages are not finally codes, and human beings are not machines for processing those not-codes.”

on concordances

“It is clear that such a display technique rips textual fragments out of context, but that is precisely its purpose: to display a text differently, to act as an estrangement device, and thereby to reveal patterns which are not otherwise visible.”