Lexical Patterns in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables: A Corpus Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

In recent years, there has been remarkable progress in computer science and technology, leading to the emergence of Computational Linguistics as a new approach for analyzing linguistic elements. This study is a mixed method approach and aims to analyze keywords and key semantic domains in Hawthorne’s selected novel shedding light on the author’s stylistic fingerprints and narrative techniques. The whole text of the novel acts as a sample and is compared to reference corpora of 19th Century Literature. Data collection is facilitated by user-friendly corpus software, Antconc is used for generating keywords and USAS and Voyant tools are used collectively for the extraction of semantic domains. This approach introduces corpus stylistic analysis, which examines language usage in specific texts, providing fresh insights into previously interpreted data. Findings reveal that the corpus approach to literary texts primarily uses quantitative data, but how those results are interpreted and assessed depends greatly on the analyst's familiarity with and understanding of the texts being studied. Ultimately, the study advocates for the utilization of corpus stylistic analysis to explore diverse aspects of literary texts but also reveals that that computerized analysis of texts is not contrary to conventional analytical methods.