[0:00]In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. Dear audience, this is language and linguistics online. Today I intend to talk about methodological considerations in stylistics. Since we have been talking about stylistics, its historical perspective, and we have talked about various theories. For example, we have talked about the role of Russian formalism, structuralism, functionalism, or pragmatics in stylistics. It is time that we should talk about how a researcher is supposed to carry out a research in stylistics. For this purpose, we need to understand that what are the methodological considerations. How you are going to apply theory or theoretical model or the kind of research paradigm that you intend to use. Since we have talked about that stylistics is the study of literary and non-literary language, examining how language is or linguistic choices, they have been made use of. They have been employed by the author or the speaker. So what kind of ideological positioning or perspective he or she has taken?
[1:31]So while we are examining these things, we also need to understand the aesthetic effect that the text is producing onto the reader or the audience. Since stylistics is an interdisciplinary field, it makes use of corpus linguistics.
[1:56]It applies linguistic theories onto the text and tries to analyze the text. Now we need to understand why methodology matters in stylistics. So methodology is not a procedural afterthought. It is the foundation that transforms impressionistic reading into scholarly analysis. Since before the application of linguistic theories, the interpretation was impressionistic. People said they had a dream at night and they analyzed the text. They did not know what is evidence, how to produce the evidence from the text that they are analyzing. So the very first thing is methodology matters because it brings rigor. So analytical rigor is there. So when you are analyzing the text, you are looking at the linguistic features, linguistic choices, the kind of nouns or pronouns or verbal phrases, the authors they have employed in their text or talk. So in this way, linguistic rigor or analytical rigor, it is there in the analysis of the text. Number two is replicability. So once you talk about that you have taken this research project, you talk about that this is your research methodology. This is the way to achieve your goals or to answer your research questions. So you design a methodology. You talk about whether it is qualitative research or quantitative research. You explain whether it is a mixed method research. Are you going to talk about or use analytical or interpretive rigor or not? Depth will be there or not or only frequency of the words you are going to talk about. So when you talk about the methodology, the way that you have taken to analyze this text, to give the answers of the research questions, people can follow your suit. They can follow the methodology. But still they can come up with different interpretation. But at least they can follow and they can make use of the evidence. They can replicate the research. So once they can replicate the research, they can give you the same answer or their answer can be different. Bridging disciplines. Methodology connects qualitative literary interpretation with quantitative linguistic evidence, creating a principled interdisciplinary practice. So if you have applied corporate stylistics, now what you are doing is that you are finding out or coming out with frequency. So now the job of the linguist, of the statistician is to make interpretation on the basis of the data, on the basis of the analysis that you have found out. Without interpretation, just giving the tables, just explaining, describing that this is what the table is telling. This is the percentage of this word. It is not enough. Nobody is going to accept your research. So you will have to talk about the linguistic choices which have been made by the author. If they are more in number, what does it mean? If they are less in number, what kind of perspective you are going to infer from it? So interpretation, rigor, it is very important. Any kind of research you want to do, there should be a research problem in front of you. So from research problem, you will be writing down coming out with your objectives or research questions. So research questions will be answered once you have analyzed the data. So research questions they play a very important role. For statement of the problem or thesis statement, consult my different videos. Research questions explore how language creates effects, how style varies across context, and how readers process textual features. Short (1996) emphasizes that effective questions must be specific, linguistically grounded, and testable through textual evidence.
[6:42]So the kind of analysis that you are carrying out, linguistically you will have to talk about the noun phrases, the verb phrases, and on the basis of that evidence you will have to talk about now what kind of interpretation you are going to make. So research questions should be specific and they can come from three different ways, from three different categories or places. Text-oriented questions. So if your focus is on the text itself, so your questions will be text-oriented. For example, how does lexical repetition contribute to thematic cohesion in Namekhana for example? What syntactic patterns characterize a poet's style? So poet style is very general. So if you say Sylvia Plath's style, it will become specific. So what syntactic patterns characterize Sylvia Plath's style? Second category will be author or genre-oriented questions. Again, they will make your question specific and it will tell what kind of approach you want to take. What distinguishes modernist prose from Victorian prose stylistically? So you are taking genre, that is prose and you are going for the comparison. That is modernist and Victorian prose style. So they are now specific because you have taken two periods prose and prose. Genre and modernist or Victorian style. Again, all the pros you cannot take. You will have to specify that some of the authors that you intend to take. And if you add their names, they will become specific. How does Hemingway's minimalism differ from Faulkner's complexity? We know that Hemingway's sentences, they are short in nature and Faulkner's sentences, they are quite complex and bigger in style. So again, even your research questions, they are telling the reader that what kind of research method you are going to take, it will be a comparative research method. Reader-oriented questions. Third category, the research question can come, it will be reader-oriented. You will have to analyze what goes on in the mind of the reader. How the reader is processing the text. What kind of reader he or she is? Afferent reading. You know, aesthetic reading. So different purposes, according to those purposes, specific research questions. How do readers process foregrounded language? So you are focusing on the language and you are making the relationship with the readers. So you will have to carry out some of the interviews as well. Besides textually analyzing the, you know, data, you can take interview as well. What stylistic features trigger emotional engagement? So readers if they read one poem and the readers are 20 in number, so collect the data from them through questionnaire or through interviews and see how they are being engaged with the text. So this is how your research questions will come. Then you should determine whether you intend to do quantitative research or qualitative research or mixed method research. If it is qualitative, interpretation and description will be required from you. Focus is on close reading, context, and nuance. So you will have to see the underlying meaning, the ideology which is kept hidden in the text. The ideological positioning which the author has taken and how you are going to break it down, analyze it into smaller pieces, the kind of noun phrases, verb phrases, adjectival phrases, what kind of theme they are adhering to. What kind of ideology they are exposing? What kind of implicature, implied meaning you can expose? So rigor, rigorous interpretation is required. Close reading is required. Each and every word which is there on the text, you will have to read, you will have to analyze. See the co-text. See the setting. See the ideological, contextual, psychological, cognitive understanding, context. Manual textual analysis, discourse and pragmatic interpretation, analyzing metaphor in Sylvia Plath's poetry for example. So if your approach, within the approach, you have got the framework, theoretical framework of, you know, cognitive stylistics. So it means you are going to deal with schema theory or metaphor theory or embodied metaphor. So depth will be there in qualitative research. But at the same time, subjectivity will be involved. So this will be the limitation of the research. But in order to lessen the subjectivity, you should focus on the theoretical framework. But still whenever the interpretation is made, somehow or the other, subjectivity gets involved. So this is the limitation of this research. Quantitative stylistics or approach, empirical and statistical, use numerical data, often corpus-based. So you will have to make the corpus. Okay. Then you will go for frequency counts. Adjectives, verbs or nouns or collocations or keyword research. Keyword in context. So this is how through and con or word smith, you will have to carry out the corpus analysis through these programs. So these frequencies again will give you the number, but interpretation will come from you. At the same time, this research also has got limitations. So here depth is not there. So this is the limitation. Comparing adjectives use and lexical diversity across authors. So objectivity is there. But interpretation, deeper interpretation is missing. Replicability is there. Handling large data set. But you can overlook nuance and requires computational tools. So if you are well versed in using computational tools, go for this research. Or you can combine these two approaches and you can make use of mixed method research. So you will have to talk about how you have collected the data. So data can come from literary text, novels, poems, plays, the traditional core of stylistic analysis. It can come from non-literary text, newspapers, speeches of the politicians, speeches of the religious scholars. Spoken data corpora, conversations, interviews, dramatic dialogue, and large digital text collections. All can become the text, all can become the data. But your research questions will determine what kind of data is required. Everything cannot be taken in just one research, because your research will be only one drop in a sea of knowledge. So remember, you will have to talk about the data that you require. So only that data you will be making use of. For designing the corpus, you should remember some of the principles. It should be representative data. Male and females, equal number of males, equal number of females, equal number of professors, male and females, equal number of doctors, males or females, equal number of engineers, males or females, equal number of novelists, male or female. If you are building a corpus because corpus means a large collection of text.
[15:05]Machine readable text, balance should be there, equal representation of categories, male or female authors. Size sufficient for statistical reliability. So it should not be a very insufficient data. It should be a sufficient large number of text if you intend to make a corpus. Authenticity, naturally occurring data is required. Naturally occurring language. As right now I am speaking, as I speak in the classroom or you speak in your day-to-day conversation. So naturally occurring data is required. Like there are so many, you know, corpora already available on the net, BNC, British National Corpus, ANC, American National Corpus, or Shakespearean corpus, that is called reference corpora for comparison. Then you will have to take, this is a subjective decision, theoretical framework. So your research questions, your research methodology, and they will help you, okay, to determine your theoretical framework as well. You want to make use of for grounding theory, formalism, structuralism or post structuralism. You want to make use of functional stylistics, so you can go back to Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. You can go for, you know, reference ellipsis, the kind of metaphors, if it is cognitive theory, lexical semantics, cohesion and coherence. So schema theory if you are dealing with cognitive stylistics and corpus stylistics, which means that large collection of text. Lastly, we have got pragmatics or pragmatic stylistics as well. So if you are dealing with speech act theory, implicature, implied meaning, okay, cooperative principles, maximum of quality, quantity, relevance, manner or relevance theory. So I have already made separate videos on pragmatic stylistics as well. Go through them. They will help you. They will equip you with knowledge that is required for the analysis. So if you know all about them, pragmatically how language is used in context, how speakers they make use of language when they are interacting with each other or one another. So kind of tools that they make use of when they are interacting, so all these things are very good. They are knowledgeable tools for you. Go through those videos. They will help you to analyze the data. Then if it is a qualitative research, you can make use of NVivo tools or you can make use of your own interpretation, interpretative rigor. If you know semantics very well, if you know how pragmatics works, semantics works. What are the figures of speeches, metaphor, simile, synecdoche, hyperbole, personification. How authors they are making use of them. If you can recognize them, if you can understand the hidden meaning of the text, if you can expose the hidden agenda of the text. So go for qualitative researches. If your design is based on corpus, then you can make use of and conc. So and conc will give you the frequency. It will give you the word count. You can also make use of word smith tools. Both of them work almost the same way in the same way, concordance lines. So there is a co-text, 10 or 15 words before that particular word or sentence, 10 or 15 words after that particular word or sentence. So you can understand the contextual meaning. So concordance, it can provide you. You can extract the keyword. You can find out the frequency of the words. You can go for the collocation analysis. Sketch engine is another tool. Annotations, for example, clause, parts of speech tagger or tagging. But these tools they can make mistakes as well. Bank multiple meanings. Red color red. He became red in face. Red shirt and red. So sometimes they are nouns, sometimes they are adjectives. Human intervention is required. Besides these tools, apply your metacognitive and cognitive abilities onto the text. Try to understand whether these tools are working properly or not. If they are committing any mistakes, you should be there to control these things. So you can make use of Python, tokenization, consult my video computational linguistics. Parsing, tagging, sentiment analysis. Voyant tools, word clouds, trend visualization across text segments. So all these things are very important when you are doing corpus analysis.
[20:26]So of course analytical techniques if it is qualitative research. So your own interpretation, your own expertise, your own, you know, intervention, the kind of knowledge, the way you understand the text, parts of speech recognition or figures of speech recognition. Semantic structures, semantic understanding, pragmatic knowledge, all play a very important role. Otherwise, concordance analysis is there in corpus stylistics. Collocation analysis is there. Identify the words that frequently co-occur, revealing habitual associations. Examples, for example, strong tea versus powerful tea. So you can find out in the text how many instances, examples are there within the text. Keyword analysis compares a target text against a reference corpus to identify statistically unusual lexical patterns. So it all depends on the kind of research questions that you have got. What you intend to do? So how you are going to make use of all these tools? Frequency, stylistic profiling. Make a profile of the corpus. Understand it, read it. Go for the close reading of this text as well. Deal with numbers, then interpret it. Remember, there are methodological challenges as well. Subjectivity in interpretation, no doubt. Whenever you do the analysis, interpretation, still you have got a theoretical framework, which will help you to analyze the text. Okay. You can develop the themes. You can go for the textual analysis. But at the same time, subjectivity 100% cannot be removed because it is social sciences. So subjectivity will be there, 10% subjectivity will be there.
[22:27]And it is omitted when you have got rigorous analysis, when you have got data, when you have got proof, evidence. On the basis of the evidence, if you are making the interpretation, you are quite objective in nature. But if you fail to present, to analyze the text, then it will become subjective analysis. Over-reliance on quantification. So some of the students, they just give the tables and graphs. Okay. And then they describe the table. They failed to understand that interpretation is missing. What is the linguistic data? The kind of noun phrases or verb phrases or adjectival phrases. What are the trigger words? How they have been used or manipulated by the author? So analyze them, understand them, interpret them. So when you interpret them, your reliance on corpus will be less. Data limitations. So if you have not collected the data carefully, if there are representational issues, if there is bias in the data, so again your research, it will have limitations. Tool limitations. As I have just talked about, tool limitations because parts of speech tagging, these and conc or word smith or clause. Okay, these tools, they can make mistakes as well. So you need to understand your intervention, intervention is required. Your interpretation is required. How much well versed you are in linguistic theories, what kind of knowledge you possess, what kind of writing strategies, abilities, capabilities you possess and how you are going to display them on a piece of paper when you are writing down the interpretation. Lastly, you should integrate models, data and tools. So your research will start from problem, research questions, theoretical model. So from theoretical model, you will go to data, you will collect the data. Data should be representative, balanced. Okay. Then the kind of tools that you are going to employ. And lastly, the analysis that you are going to carry out and on the basis of analysis, the kind of interpretation that you are going to make out. All these things are very important. So in this video, I have talked about the importance of methodology in stylistic analysis. Thank you very much.
