Narrative Progression in the Short Story : A Corpus Stylistic Approach

Drawing on corpus linguistic methods, this study attempts to specify crucial textual resources with which reader expectations are guided and changed in the course of reading modern short stories.This is a major contribution to the exciting new field of corpus stylistics and narratology.

It seeks to justify every analytical step and claim, with copious textual evidence.

It re-asserts the importance to literary stylistic analysis of detailed scrutiny of the language in the text.

It throws a new light on some familiar short stories and some contemporary masterpieces.

It explores the potential and the limits of present-day, digitally-enabled, analysis of narrative text.

It grapples with a fundamental unsolved problem in linguistics: to what extent can the earlier part of a text or discourse make the later parts predictable or foreknown?Why do readers have such rich emotional and intellectual reactions to a story, especially in the course of reading it?

This book attempts to identify the crucial bases, in the language of a short story's text, for reader's real-time forming of expectations about how the story will proceed.