LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 18:9 September 2018
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
         Dr. S. Chelliah, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Collocations and Collocational Networks of Characters:
A Corpus-based Feminist Stylistic Analysis

Ohood Ali Mohammed Saif Al-Nakeeb
Basheer Ahmed Hamood Mufleh

1. Abstract

The aim of this paper is to detect the linguistic construction of fe/male characters in a specialised literary corpus. The corpus (GHANEM) consists of Qais Ghanem’s three novels Final Flight from Yemen (2011), Two Boys from Aden College (2012) and Forbidden Love in the Land of Sheba (2014), which are respectively referred to as FFFS, TBAC and FLLS henceforth. The collocations of major Yemeni characters as well as their shared collocates are analysed using collocation networks created by the GraphColl function in the corpus analytical tool LancsBox. The quantitative collocation analysis aids in extracting concordance lines for the in-depth qualitative analysis at the lexical level investigating adjectives and nouns collocates, and at the lexico-grammatical level through looking at transitivity processes (e.g. material, mental, relational) as set out in Burton (1982) and adapted later by Mills (1995). The analysis results in the following: not all characters belonging to the same gender are equally represented. All the male characters along with one female character (Hana) are evaluated as cheerful and playful. These are lively characters who are able to express feelings and thoughts and relate to others. On the other hand, the other female characters Salma and Muna are depicted as sufferers who are indifferent, unimportant and dependent.

Keywords: Corpus-based, feminist stylistics, collocation, GraphColl, transitivity, characters.

2. Introduction

Characters in prose fiction as well as in drama have been exploited by both literary critics and stylisticians. The simple reason for such an interest is that "characters are made of words, they are not simulacra of humans –they are simply words which the reader has learned how to construct into a set of ideological messages drawing on her knowledge of the way that texts have been written and continue to be written, and the views which are circulating within society about how women and men are" (Mills, 1995, 160). With that in mind, these ideological messages are clearly formed by the systematic and frequent co-occurrence of words in the text, known as collocations. Indeed, collocates can tell much about how characters represent themselves or being represented by narrators. Moreover, collocational networks or “the connectivity between individual collocates” (Brezina et al., 2015, p. 141) can demonstrate how characters belonging to the same gender are connected, thus exposing shared patterns of representation.

This is only the beginning part of the ARTICLE. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Ohood Ali Mohammed Saif Al-Nakeeb
Research Scholar
Department of Linguistics
University of Kerala
India
ohoodnakeeb@gmail.com


Basheer Ahmed Hamood Mufleh
Research Scholar
Department of Linguistics
University of Kerala
India
bmufleh@gmail.com

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