Corpus linguistics is a incredibly specific field of study with grave implications on how post-modern individuals read text and incorporate with text on the internet. A few examples of these avenues are “critical discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, English language teaching and socio-linguistics” pg 52. One aspect of corpus linguistics is the analysis of language patterns. Through using devices such as lexicography, concordance analysis and semantic prosodies analysis scholars can infer from language patterns ideologies, points of views in relation to English language teaching or scholarship.
As more texts are converted into digital files and become accessible on the internet, companies and web sites will have the unique ability to use corpus analysis on these texts. One example of this presently occurring is the Harvard+Google text conversion program.
“The Harvard University Library and Google are collaborating on a project to digitize a large number of Harvard’s library books that are out of copyright and to make them available to Internet users. The project, which is one of several collaborations between Google and major research libraries, could bring millions of works to the web.”
The advantage of digital conversion, is being able to use corpus strategies to analyze various texts. In Chapter 5 Svenja talks about how these strategies will effect the reading experience. By using corpus on literary texts scholars can infer an authors individual style or the context of his or her own work. The goal for these types of ‘strategies’ is to attain correct interpretation based upon word frequency. One example of this is in the Heart of Darkness where ‘vagueness’ was a common theme. However, I would like to note that this work is incredibly deep and has an incredible amount of layers. Another goal for corpus programmers is to analyze poems and fictional works.
Heart of darkness
“It becomes clear from examples above that the omission of reporting clauses in the ‘free’ forms can make the assignment of narratorial perspective some what difficult…. the syntactic similarities of free indirect speech and indirect thorugh add further to this complication, since we cannot always be sure who is speaking or indeed whether a character is speaking or thinking”
But this objective is inherent.
However, this is where it gets tricky. What is “correct interpretation”? In my personal opinion, I feel that the essence of reading a fiction or a poem is for private and subjective interpretation. Corpus linguists must be cautious when using this type of devices to interpret text and “remove” the narrator from his or her story. It is interesting that Svenja brings up Corpus’ ability to distinguish the narratorial perspective. If the reader is able to distinguish what is the author’s interjection and what is genuinely from the character’s point of view, than characters or concepts can take on their own essence inside of stories void from the authors own perspective.
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