Lexical Style and Profession: The Use of Nouns in Tawfik’s Short Story “The Uninvited” | ||||
مجلة کلية الأداب - جامعة السويس | ||||
Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available Online from 07 January 2025 | ||||
Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||||
DOI: 10.21608/jfask.2025.349919.1196 | ||||
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Author | ||||
رغدة رجب ![]() | ||||
جامعة السويس قسم اللغة الإنجليزية | ||||
Abstract | ||||
This paper investigates Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s short story “The Uninvited” from the Now We Open the Box short stories collection. The story undergoes a statistical lexical stylistic analysis following Leech and Short’s (2007) Checklist of Linguistic and Stylistic Categories investigating the use of nouns throughout the story in order to explore the existence and the depth of the professional influence on Tawfik’s lexical style, being a physician-writer. The excerpt investigated comprises a range of 403 nouns, of which 61 are pronouns, and 43 are proper nouns (10.7%). The 403 nouns are categorized into 108 abstract nouns (31.6%) and 234 concrete nouns (68.4%). The text is analyzed separately then the statistical results are compared to reach general conclusions about the author and his lexical style. The nouns have been analyzed to reach a quantitative result followed by some qualitative analysis of some of the apparent stylistic features in the text. The analysis shows significant use of proper nouns denoting medical references, as well as a high correlation between concrete nouns and medical context throughout the story, being the reason behind Tawfik’s dominant stylistic choice of concrete words. The use of nouns, hence, reflects the deep professional influence on Tawfik’s writing. | ||||
Keywords | ||||
Stylistics; lexical; nouns; medical; professional influence | ||||
Statistics Article View: 60 |
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