Classroom Corpus Stylistics, Language Acquisition and Intertextuality – A Work-in-Progress Report

Classroom Corpus Stylistics, Language Acquisition and Intertextuality – A Work-in-Progress Report

Milojković, Marija

Although semantic prosody, introduced to the academic community by Louw (1993), has since been the subject of some debate, a consensus on the existence and power of this linguistic phenomenon (diagnosable through corpus analysis alone) has been reached (McEnery and Hardie (2012). Its existence in other languages has also been confirmed, as well as its implications for language teaching (e.g. the Chinese generally tend to use the verb ‘cause’ positively, in defiance of its negative prosody, see Zhang (2009)). The implications of semantic prosodies for translation have also been considered (Stewart 2009). This paper reports the development of corpus stylistics pedagogy based on the key linguistic phenomena discovered by Louw. Along with semantic prosody, these include relexicalisation (a corpus-accessible feature that all literary devices have in common, see Louw (2008)) and logical semantic prosody – subtext (Louw 2010). The existence of subtext has been proved in Russian (Milojkovic 2011), which points to the possibility of its universality. This initial stage of the project will involve second year students of English, University of Belgrade, who do not have a prior grounding in corpus linguistics or literary stylistics. The use of stylistics terminology relevant to Louw’s theory will be avoided. The students will be asked to analyse short excerpts from English poetic and prose texts using reference corpora (the BNC and the corpus of the 1995 edition of the Times newspaper). After the analysis, they will be given the same texts in their existing Serbian translation and asked if the translations incorporate the stylistic features discovered in the originals. For the purposes of this paper the research questions will be 1) what is the successful methodology of a corpus stylistics pedagogy, 2) what is the effect of corpus stylistics methods on students’ awareness of the nuances of language use and 3) what is the effect of the comparison between the original and the translated text. Answers to these questions will be obtained through a combination of a qualitative survey and the teacher’s observation.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

907