Corporum (Jun 2020)
A Corpus-based Study of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Abstract
Exploring literary text(s) with corpus-based approaches is becoming popular and enlarging our understanding of a particular phenomenon in a text. This study aims to encourage novice researchers to utilize corpus-based approaches while conducting research in the domain of literature. The present study applies a corpus-driven approach to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to see how well this new method works with literary texts. It has been found that the corpus-driven approach can provide quite a few results that are useful in supporting and refining literary scholars’ intuitive observations on the author’s works. The significance of the title and concordance hits and concordance plot of the words portrait, artist, and young man in the title are observed. The imperative sentences used are explored throughout the novel. Out of all linguistic features, thirty most used words were collected, which belonged to different parts of speech and their frequency were noted. The analyst’s knowledge and understanding of the text(s) under study are crucial in interpreting and evaluating those results because the corpus-driven approach to literary texts relies heavily on quantitative data. The study affirms that the text can be well interpreted and explained by using AntConc software.
