Corpus Stylistics as Contextual Prosodic Theory and Subtext

The volume presents Louw's Contextual Prosodic Theory from its beginnings to its newest applications. It journeys from delexicalisation and relexicalisation into Semantic Prosody and then to the heart of its contextual requirements within collocation and the thinking of J.R. Firth. Once there, it moves much of Firth’s and Malinowski’s thinking into a computational method based upon the ability of language to govern and analyse itself using collocation to plot its scope and limits. With the assistance of analytic philosophy, it parts logic (grammar) from metaphysics (vocabulary) along the lines of a non-computational formula of Bertrand Russell, and so falsifies the major premise of the Vienna Circle using its own central tenet: the Principle of Verification. Having arrived at corpus-derived subtext (the semantic aura of grammar strings, as distinguished from Semantic Prosody), the second half of the book proceeds to verify the theory on Slavic languages. The focus is on the poet Alexander Pushkin, whose authorial intention becomes computationally recoverable. Prose is handled on samples authored by David Lodge, where authorial (in)sincerity (Louw 1993) is viewed on a cline of inspiration and quality of discourse. Other applications in the volume include studies on translation, negotiation, humour, and the reception of CPT.

Robin Feng and Philippe Humblé, in Style 51(4): 550-555, 2017:
The term corpus stylistics, usually regarded as a near-synonym for stylometry, stylometrics, statistical stylistics, or stylogenetics, is closely related to statistics and corpus linguistics. Despite an increasing number of studies in the field, people still do not attain a clear line of demarcation between corpus linguistics and corpus stylistics. Corpus linguists are typically concerned with “repeated occurrences, generalizations and the description of typical patterns,” while corpus stylistic studies relate to “deviations from linguistic norms that account for the artistic effects of a particular text” (Mahlberg, “Corpus Stylistic Perspective” 19). However, more needs to be known about what new perspectives corpus linguistics can offer to the depiction of stylistic devices and the interpretation of stylistic values. Under these circumstances, Bill Louw and Marija Milojkovic’s Corpus Stylistics as Contextual Prosodic Theory and Subtext is instructive and worthy of reading, for it offers valuable perspectives for interdisciplinary investigations.