Corpus-driven Analysis on the Language of Children’s Literature

Evynurul Laily Zen

2018

Abstract

This current paper examined distinctive patterns of language that characterize children’s literature using a corpus-driven approach. I built a limited corpus—CoCL (Corpus of Children’s Literature)—of 28 novels and short stories that were published in the late 19th to the early 20th available on Project Gutenberg and written by four prominent writers; Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carrol, Beatrix Potter and Hugh Lofting. With the utilization of WMatrix and AntConc as the corpus tools, the 319.968 tokens of CoCL were further analyzed and compared to the BNC Written Imaginative. The findings demonstrated several features distinguishing the language of this particular genre to adult fictions including significant uses of noun and subjective pronoun, explicit articulations of smallness, animals, and food, as well as cultivation of positive vibes, joyful tones, and optimism. The paper attempted to enrich evidence on the effectiveness of corpora in both linguistic and literary analysis that was, at the same time, seen to mark the advancement of digital world in language research.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Laily Zen E. (2018). Corpus-driven Analysis on the Language of Children’s Literature.In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Recent Innovations - Volume 1: ICRI, ISBN 978-989-758-458-9, pages 17-22. DOI: 10.5220/0009912700170022

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icri18,
author={Evynurul Laily Zen},
title={Corpus-driven Analysis on the Language of Children’s Literature},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Recent Innovations - Volume 1: ICRI,},
year={2018},
pages={17-22},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009912700170022},
isbn={978-989-758-458-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Recent Innovations - Volume 1: ICRI,
TI - Corpus-driven Analysis on the Language of Children’s Literature
SN - 978-989-758-458-9
AU - Laily Zen E.
PY - 2018
SP - 17
EP - 22
DO - 10.5220/0009912700170022