A Corpus Stylistic Study of Singular and Plural Keywords in Jane Austen’s Persuasion

While many corpus stylistic studies that draw on keywords pay attention tomeanings of the lexical items, the present study focuses on their grammatical forms andargues that the forms largely account for the significance of keywords of a text and theircontributions to meanings in a literary text. The nouns “years” and “man”, which werefound to be statistically significant in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, were studied in terms oftheir co-occurrence patterns and textual functions. Concordance lines of these two wordswere analysed in comparison with their singular and plural non-key counterparts. Theanalysis reveals that the singular and plural forms of the keywords play an important role inthe construction of thematic meanings and narrative techniques in the novel. It is suggestedthat an examination of grammatical aspects of keywords can provide contributions notonly to literary studies of a novel but also to corpus stylistic methods and to theoreticallinguistic arguments on word meanings.