|
Note: This is a new version of a previously announced book.
Newly Published in Paperback!
One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what
will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very
limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a
staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book
proposes that a matrix of narrativity-furthering textual features is
crucial to the reader’s forming of expectations about how a literary story
will continue to its close. Toolan uses corpus linguistic software and
methods, and stylistic and narratological theory, in the course of
delineating the matrix of eight parameters that he sees as crucial to
creating narrative progression and expectation. The book will be of
interest to stylisticians, narratologists, corpus linguists, and short
story scholars.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements ix–x
List of figures and tables xi
Chapter 1. Introduction: Narrative prospecting 1–13
Chapter 2. Collocation and corpus stylistics 15–30
Chapter 3. Lexical patternings in short stories 31–51
Chapter 4. Top keyword sentences as story waymarking 53–76
Chapter 5. Keywords and the language of guidance in "The Love of a Good
Woman" 77–95
Chapter 6. Repetition and para-repetition in story structure 97–112
Chapter 7. Prospection and expectation: Core signalling 113–133
Chapter 8. Prospection and expectation: Embedded signalling 135–164
Chapter 9. The textual tracking of suspense and surprise. 165–188
Chapter 10. Next steps 189–200
References 201–208
Name index 209
Topic index 211–212
|
