A Corpus-Driven Approach to Stylistic Analysis of a Lexical Richness Curve

Scientific Study from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, Thi-Qar University (College of Arts), language: English, abstract: This book is an attempt to explore the lexical richness of certain well-known literary texts using a statistical gauge called lexical richness curve. The analysis conducted throughout this scientific study is corpus-based and a recent version of WordSmith Tools (0.7) is used to process the basic statistical frequencies of types and tokens. The study depends basically on a wordlist tool used to analyze digital samples of six novels written by three grand novelists: Virginia Woolf's The Waves and To the Lighthouse , James Joyce's Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and William Faulkner's Light in August and The Sound and Fury .Fifteen samples are taken randomly from each novel with ( 1000 ) tokens intervals, so the overall samples used in the study are 90 samples. Then each sample is statistically analyzed to find about its lexical richness .The number of the types ( distinct vocabulary words ) and the number of the tokens ( words ) are counted for each sample. The ratio of types and tokens are presented visually by using Microsoft Office Excel diagrams. This will facilitate a rigorous process of figuring out the lexical richness of each novel. It is quite evident that Joyce's Ulysses holds the highest rate of lexical richness while Faulkner's Light in August reserves the lowest lexical richness curve. As for Woolf, her novels are located somewhere in the middle with an exceptional approaching observed in The Waves to Joyce's Ulysses in some textual samples. Moreover, it is an evident feature that the type - token curves for Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Woolf's To the Lighthouse are virtually reciprocal indicating an exceptional similarity in their lexical repertoires.