Quantitative methodological approaches to stylistics

Stylistics, understood as the study of the language of literary texts (Halliday 1967) and a method for textual analysis (Carter 2007, Verdonk 2002), is a product of the twentieth century formalists’ concern for the systematising of literary interpretation (see Jeffries and McIntyre 2010, p. 1). However, since the institutionalisation of literature around the end of the nineteenth century, literary scholars have tended to keep borders between language and literature very clear-cut and have resisted methods that could bear resemblance to those used in natural sciences. Most still hold the view that ‘the humanities deal in what is deep down, really humane, benign, mild, open-minded and understanding, the quintessence of what is taken to be human, while the sciences would fail such a perspective’ (van Peer 2008, p. 5). More recently, Sklar (2013, pp. 166-167) has stressed that ‘In literary studies, there is a tendency for some scholars to reject the inclusion of psychological, philosophical, and, especially, scientifi c content in support of literary aims or theories,’ and he adds that they are ‘ill-equipped to speculate on issues that lie outside of their areas of specialty. Yet, they frequently make assertions or raise questions that literary scholarship, as a discipline, seems incapable of answering.’

Linguistics · Stylistics · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · linguistics and terminology studies · Philosophy

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