A Corpus Stylistic Analysis of Some Lexical and Semantic Devices in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction

Abstract

This research examines some lexical and semantic devices such as collocation, semantic preference, semantic prosody and lexical clusters in a compiled corpus of four trilogies of young adult dystopian fictions that cover the period from 2008 to 2013. The AntConc software is used for the Word List, Collocation, N-Grams and Concordance tools. The employed linguistic framework is eclectic because it draws on techniques and models from Mahlberg (2007), Leech and Short (2007), and Sinclair (2007). The main objective of this study is to illustrate how the techniques of corpus linguistics validate literary analysis. Findings of the study revealed that corpus linguistics aids the exploration of textual and thematic features that may transcend traditional stylistic analysis. Findings also showed that frequent occurrence of nouns referring to different parts of human body is associated with the important role played by body parts in dystopian fiction to identify the characters' physical and habitual traits. Furthermore, the frequent occurrence of adjectives as collocates of nouns referring to body parts reveals that dystopian fiction is descriptive and visual in nature.