Abstract
This master’s thesis presents a corpus-stylistic analysis of Margaret Mitchell’s novel "Gone with the Wind" and Ernest Hemingway’s novel "A Farewell to Arms". The analysis draws on a corpus stylistic approach, outlined by Semino and Short (2004) and further developed by Michaela Mahlberg (2012). The electronic texts of the novels are analysed with the help of the corpus software AntConc that is used to identify N-grams or frequent sequences of words. Besides, the corpus tool WordSmith is applied to find the keywords, the words that are particularly prominent in the novels in comparison to the reference corpus. The overall hypothesis of the thesis is that a corpus stylistic approach of Michaela Mahlberg can help in interpreting the novels "Gone with the Wind" and "A Farewell to Arms". The conducted research has shown that longer N-grams like 8- and 7-grams prove to be character specific and exclusive for the novels’ styles. Shorter ones as 6-, 5- and 4-grams are partly character specific, otherwise they can be grouped according to the functions they perform: labels, speech clusters, time and place clusters, body part clusters, as if clusters and other. Mahlberg’s observation about the higher frequency of shorter clusters holds true for the N-grams from "Gone with the Wind" and "A Farewell to Arms": 5-, 4- and 3-grams are more frequent and larger in number than 8-, 7- and 6-grams.