Orality vs. Literacy in Two of Arthur Miller’s Plays: A Corpus-Based Study | ||||
| هرمس | ||||
| Article 3, Volume 11, Issue 3 - Serial Number 41, July 2022, Page 71-100 PDF (3.4 MB) | ||||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/herms.2022.248186 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Authors | ||||
| Mohammed Negm1; Waleed Mandour2 | ||||
| 1Professor of Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Tanta University | ||||
| 2Instructor of English Language Center for Preparatory Studies, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| This study aims to compare the key protagonists in two masterpieces of Arthur Miller: Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (first published in 1955) and Quentin in After the Fall in terms of Ong’s discursive orality and literacy features (Ong, 2013). Miller deployed a variety of linguistic features to reflect Willy’s uneducated background vis-à-vis Quentin’s literate-innate nature. The study employs up-to-date corpus methods in analyzing literary texts by which the researchers: firstly, constructed two corpora in XML format for both plays; secondly, marked up the character’s lines before compiling and parsing the corpora; and thirdly, extracted a subcorpus for each character’s speech in order to inspect, compare and contrast the linguistic aspects in question. The process renders 11,781 tokens for Willy’s speech (representing 38.2% of the play) and 16,976 tokens for Quentin’s (almost a half of the play’s narration). Results affirm existential orality/literacy linguistic phenomena in Miller’s protagonists as deemed by Ong, such as redundancy vs abundance. However, unlike Ong’s presumption, both characters interdiscursively share certain language items, such as additives. In this sense, findings attest epistemological and cultural reflections that profile the common man’s thoughts and concerns as Miller drew in his two literary works. His characters are realistically portrayed in a way that conforms with what has been previously argued by Negm (1986 & 1996) in his traditionally qualitative analysis of Miller’s works. In other words, the present study complements and supplements Negm’s previous studies in a quantitative method of analysis | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Orality; Literacy; Literary Discourse Analysis; Corpus Literary Analysis | ||||
| References | ||||
|
Bigsby, C., & Bigsby, C. W. (Eds.). (2010). The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge University Press. Evans, R. (1981). Psychology and Arthur Miller. Praeger Publishers. Goody, J. (1987). The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge University Press. Griffin, A. (1996). Understanding Arthur Miller. University of South Carolina Press. Hall, M. C. (2019, September). Critical Disability Theory. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Winter 2019 Edition). (E. N. Zalta, Ed.) From https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/disability-critical/ Havelock, E. (1986). The muse learns to write: Reflections on orality and literacy from antiquity to the present. Yale University Press. Ho, D. (2017). Notepad++ [Software]. From https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ Kiesling, S. (2015). Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Communication and Discourse Analysis. In D. Tannen, Hamilton, H. E., & D. Schiffrin, The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Vol. 1, pp. 650-670). Wiley Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118584194. Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J., ... & Suchomel, V. (2014). The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography, 1(1), 7-36. Lurii︠a︡, A. R. (1976). Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations. Harvard University Press. Maingueneau, D. (2010). Literature and discourse analysis. Acta linguistica hafniensia, 42, 147-158. Martin, R. A. (1996). The Nature of Tragedy in Arthur Miller's" Death of a Salesman". South Atlantic Review, 97-106. McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2011). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge University Press. Meekosha, & Shuttleworth, R. (2009). What’s so ‘Critical’ about Critical Disability Studies? What’s so ‘Critical’ about Critical Disability Studies?, 1(15). Australian Journal of Human Rights. doi:10.1080/1323238X.2009.11910861 Miller, A. (1977). Tragedy and the Common Man. University of California at Berkeley, Department of English. Viking Press. Miller, A. (1986). Death of a Salesman (Revised Edition). Penguin. Miller, A. (2015). After the fall. Bloomsbury Publishing. Miller, A. (2015). The Last Yankee. Bloomsbury Publishing. Negm, M. (1986). A stylistic, Sociolinguistic, and Discourse Analysis of Linguistic Naturalism in Selected Plays of Arthur Miller and Eugene O'neill (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation). Delaware: University of Delaware. Negm, M. (1995). Speaking and Writing as Inter-discursive Modes: Prolegomenon. CDELT. Cairo: Ain Shams University. Negm, M. (1996). Letter writing as an Interdiscursive Genre. CDELT. Cairo: Ain Shams University. Nellhaus, T. (2010). Orality, Literacy, and Early Theatre. In T. Nellhaus, Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism (pp. (pp. 57-94). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ong, W. (2013). Orality and literacy. Routledge. London and New York. Ortmann, K., & Dipper, S. (2019). Variation between Different Discourse Types: Literate vs. Oral. the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, (pp. 64-79). Priestley, M. (1998). Constructions and creations: idealism, materialism and disability theory. Disability & Society, 13(7), 75-94. Schalk, S. (2017). Critical Disability Studies as Methodology. doi:10.25158/L6.1.13 Semino, E. (2011). Stylistics. In J. Simpson, The Routledge handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 541-553). Taylor & Francis. Steiner, G. (1996). The death of tragedy. Yale University Press. Tannen, D. (1984). Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. New Jersey: ABLEX Publishing Corporation. Tannen, D., Hamilton, H. E., & Schiffrin, D. (2015). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Vol. 1). (D. H. Tannen, Ed.) Wiley Blackwell. From 10.1002/9781118584194 Williams, R. (2013). From Hero to Victim: the Making of Liberal Tragedy, to Ibsen and Miller. In R. Williams, Modern Tragedy. Random House. New York.
| ||||
|
Statistics Article View: 140 PDF Download: 120 |
||||
