ABSTRACT
Recently, methods from corpus linguistics have increasingly been applied in the analysis of literary texts. In this chapter, the authors outline some techniques for using corpora to study poetry and drama and demonstrate the value of using a corpus linguistic methodology in stylistic analysis. To demonstrate how corpus linguistic techniques might be applied in the analysis of poetry and drama, the authors analyze two specially constructed corpora. The first contains the poems from William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and the second is composed of approximately 200,000 words of Hollywood blockbuster film-scripts. Practical constraints meant that the people were not able to balance their corpus according to year of production. Nonetheless, the people analytical findings at least provide some measure of objective support for the more subjective claims of Film Studies, which may be further tested against larger corpora.
