Chapter 3

Corpus stylistics and our corpora

This chapter first discusses how corpus research can contribute to the study of stylistics and reviews how it has been applied to analysing fictional and non-fictional texts. Then the two corpora we created for our comparative research and the annotation systems we applied to the corpora will be discussed. To compare the two corpora we used two different annotation systems to achieve two main aims. One is to identify stylistic features of contemporary present-tense narrative by comparing them with those in past-tense narrative, and the other is to examine whether the way characters’ speech, writing and thoughts are presented in present-tense narrative is different from the way they are presented in past-tense narrative. To achieve the first objective, an automatic part-of-speech annotation system was used, while for the second, a discourse presentation model developed by Semino and Short (2004) was employed.