(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
9 , or overflow into Fondness, before the rest of the World. Uxander and
10 constant Benignity in Commerce with the rest of the World, which ought
11 onsciousness that he is superior to the rest of the World. Or, to say
12 out the Town to the Disadvantage of the rest of the World. Were it not
13 of a Body, which, with relation to the rest of the World, might as we
14 peating such Pleasures and Pains to the rest of the World; but I speak
Figure 3: Concordance for the rest of the (fourteen-line sample)
The prevalence at R1 of ‘world’ (fourteen times in the full concordance) and ‘company’
(four times) underline the social orientation of the topics discussed by Steele. Note also
the positioning with regard to the rest of the world as indicated by the prepositions at L1
(‘with’, ‘from whence’, ‘unlike’, ‘above’, ‘before’, ‘to’); note particularly how someone
or something may be ‘superior to’ (line 11), how one stands ‘with relation to’ (line 13),
and how one can have the ‘Esteem’ (line 4) of, ‘Privilege’ (8) over, ‘Benignity’ (10)
with, and do something to the ‘Disadvantage’ (12) of the rest of the world.
5. How useful are these techniques?
There are two main benefits of corpus stylistic methods, both of which are evident in
the results above. Firstly, a corpus-based stylistic approach allows the researcher to
identify patterns that would probably not be evident using more traditional approaches.
For example, it is unlikely that a reading of Addison’s and Steele’s Spectator essays,
however close, would have detected a contrast between their preferences for personal
pronouns and possessives. While Addison shows a strong tendency to align himself
with the reader by using a relatively large number of first person plurals, Steele prefers
the less inclusive, non-referential ‘you’. Also, both the keyword and cluster analyses of
Addison’s essays revealed a predilection for drawing comparisons, with likewise and
same as keywords, and the four-word strings containing ‘same’ and one of the most as
common clusters. It is improbable that such an observation could have been made using
traditional methods.
Secondly, a corpus-stylistic approach allows us to support intuitively-based insights
with empirical data. For instance, the major focus of Addison on literary discussion and
the importance of the social world in Steele’s contributions are backed up by the
semantic make-up of the content-reflecting keywords and clusters in our analysis.
Similarly, grammatical observations, such as the tendency for a typical Addisonian
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