Narrative progression in the short story a corpus stylistic approach - Toolan, Michael J. (John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2009)
Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-208) and indexes
Introduction : narrative prospecting -- Collocation and corpus stylistics -- Lexical patternings in short stories -- Top keyword sentences as story waymarking -- Keywords and the language of guidance in "The love of a good woman" -- Repetition and para-repetition in story structure -- Prospection and expectation : core signalling -- Prospection and expectation : embedded signalling -- The textual tracking of suspense and surprise -- Next steps
One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book proposes that a matrix of narrativity-furthering textual features is crucial to the reader's forming of expectations about how a literary story will continue to its close. Toolan uses corpus linguistic software and methods, and stylistic and narratological theory, in the course of delineating the matrix of eight parameters that he sees as crucial to creating narrative progression and expectation. --From publisher's description