Pragmatic patterns in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
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Michael Stubbs
Michael Stubbs
retired in 2013 from a Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Trier, Germany. He was previously Professor of English in Education, University of London, and Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Nottingham, UK. He has published books and articles on educational linguistics, discourse analysis, computer-assisted corpus semantics, and stylistics, and has lectured in Australia, Canada, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, USA, Yemen, and several European countries.
Abstract
In an influential book on literary linguistics, first published in 1981 and revised in 2007, Geoffrey Leech and his colleague Mick Short discuss linguistic methods of analysing long texts of prose fiction. This article develops their arguments in two ways: (1) by relating them to classic puzzles in the philosophy of science; and (2) by illustrating them with a computer-assisted study of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. This case study shows that software can identify a linguistic feature of the novel which is central to its major themes, but which is unlikely to be consciously noticed by human readers. Quantitative data on the novel show that it contains a large number of negatives. Their function is often to deny something which would normally be expected, and therefore to express the protagonists’ distrust of their own senses in the extraordinary world in which they find themselves.
About the author
Michael Stubbs
retired in 2013 from a Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Trier, Germany. He was previously Professor of English in Education, University of London, and Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Nottingham, UK. He has published books and articles on educational linguistics, discourse analysis, computer-assisted corpus semantics, and stylistics, and has lectured in Australia, Canada, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, USA, Yemen, and several European countries.
Acknowledgements
Mick Short made a large number of helpful suggestions on an earlier draft. For other criticisms I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers, to Gabi Keck, and to members of the English Linguistics Circle at the University of Trier who commented on a spoken version of the paper in late 2019.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorials
- Geoff Leech and principled practices
- Remembering Geoffrey Leech
- Full Length Articles
- The Written British National Corpus 2014 – design and comparability
- Practices of discursive urban place-making in Brooklyn, New York: (hidden) digital and embodied discourse
- ‘You said, we did’: a corpus-based analysis of marketising discourse in healthcare websites
- Compliment responses in Hong Kong: an application of Leech’s pragmatics of politeness
- Stance in press releases versus business news: a lexical bundle approach
- Identifying and describing functional discourse units in the BNC Spoken 2014
- Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s
- Recent advances in the corpus-based study of ongoing grammatical change in English
- The readability of online health information for L1 and L2 Australians: text-based and user-focused research
- Pragmatic patterns in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
- Epilogue
- Afterword
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorials
- Geoff Leech and principled practices
- Remembering Geoffrey Leech
- Full Length Articles
- The Written British National Corpus 2014 – design and comparability
- Practices of discursive urban place-making in Brooklyn, New York: (hidden) digital and embodied discourse
- ‘You said, we did’: a corpus-based analysis of marketising discourse in healthcare websites
- Compliment responses in Hong Kong: an application of Leech’s pragmatics of politeness
- Stance in press releases versus business news: a lexical bundle approach
- Identifying and describing functional discourse units in the BNC Spoken 2014
- Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s
- Recent advances in the corpus-based study of ongoing grammatical change in English
- The readability of online health information for L1 and L2 Australians: text-based and user-focused research
- Pragmatic patterns in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
- Epilogue
- Afterword
