Explorations in Stylistics - Andrew Goatly
Corpus linguistics, Systemic Functional Grammar and literary meaning: a critical analysis of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Explorations in Stylistics - Andrew Goatly
Andrew Goatly [+]
Lingnan University
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Andrew Goatly has considerable experience in teaching English language and literature in colleges and universities in the UK, Rwanda, Thailand, Austria, and Singapore. He is at present Professor in the English Department of Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He is the author of The Language of Metaphors (Routledge 1997, 2nd edition, 2010), Critical Reading and Writing (Routledge 2000), Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (Benjamins 2007)and Humour and Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Description
This chapter falls into two halves. In Part 1 the author uses a Critical Linguistic approach, based on Systemic Functional lexico-grammatical (SFG) analysis, to investigate how word frequency data and concordancing can help reveal the ideologies represented in the text. In Part 2 the author briefly argues that such an analysis gives only a partial view, and that, especially in the case of literature, the straightforward move from forms to meanings inherent in the semantic Critical Linguistics approach is problematised by factors such as propositional attitude.