(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
editing they were ready to be analyzed. If your texts are in a non-machine-readable
format, then a considerable amount of time may have to be spent in preparing the texts
before any analysis can be performed. Of course, there is also the problem of copyright
restrictions for more recent texts.
6. Conclusion
This paper has shown how one may go about a corpus-based stylistic analysis of a set of
texts, in this case the contributions of Addison and Steele to The Spectator between
1711 and 1712. Results bring to the surface both content and functional aspects of the
texts. Keyword and cluster analyses reveal Addison’s contributions to be weighted
towards literary discussion. The language of his essays reflect his propensity for
drawing comparisons, making evaluations and concerning himself with mental objects
such as the imagination.
The language of Steele’s contributions, on the other hand, is situated to a greater extent
in the social world. As with Addison, evaluations are also prevalent. The two writers
display different patterns of personal pronoun and possessive use, Addison favoring
first person plurals, Steele second person. Grammatical preferences, such as Addison’s
use of which-relatives, and discourse preferences (for my own part, if we look into in
Addison’s list of common four-word clusters) are prominent in the data.
It is claimed that corpus keyword and cluster techniques may be useful tools for those
performing stylistic analyses, although researchers should be aware of the procedural
and practical limitations of these approaches.
References
Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar
of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Bond, D. F. (ed.) 1965. The Spectator. Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press.
Culpeper, J. 2009. ‘Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech and semantic catagories in the
character-talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet’, International Journal of
Corpus Linguistics 14 (1), 29-59.
Fischer-Starcke, B. 2009. ‘Keywords and frequent phrases of Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice: A corpus-stylistic analysis’, International Journal of Corpus
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