Concordancing O. Henry's The Cop and The Anthem

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Concordancing O. Henry's The Cop and The Anthem A concordancer is one of the simplest but, at the same time, most powerful tools to elicit certain types of information-in a quick and effective way- from the diverse corpora available nowadays. Concordancers have been widely used in linguistics, above all in text-type studies which rely on quantitative analysis. There have been significant development in corpus linguistics during recent years. Yet linguistics is not the only field where concordancers may prove useful. Literary criticism might also be benefited from it. This paper argues for the use of concordances to literary texts. As an extremely powerful hypothesis testing device on vast amounts of data, the computer allows controlled speculation, makes hidden structures visible, enhances at the same time imagination and checks it by inductivity, thus making higher degrees of objectivity possible. Here I choose as topic the plot and characterization and writing style in a famous short story by an American writer O. Henry, The Cop and The Anthem. The concordancing programs I use in this case is Wconcord and Wordsmith . I load the text The Cop and The Anthem into Wordsmith. It provides some general statistics about the text: Bytes13,892 Tokens2,374 Types965 Type/Token Ratio40.65 Standardised Type/Token48.85 Ave. Word Length4.54 Sentences117 Sent.length20.15 sd. Sent. Length16.66 Para. length1,187.00 sd. Para. length1,667.36 1-letter words85 2-letter words350 3-letter words563 4-letter words370 For this text the bytes is 13,892 and the tokens are 2,374 and the sentences are 117, which can be interpreted as a sign for a short text. Its token/ratio is 40.65.This can be interpreted as a sign for a middle-... ... middle of paper ... ... this story easily and clearly. It’s just under the so-called capitalist democracy that Soapy attempted to seek for his special happiness from prison .He did so many evil things yet no policeman sent him to prison. Just when he was moved by an anthem and determined to start a new life he was captured by a policeman and tried for three months captivity in prison. Either on the plots or the characterization or the writing style O.Henry may be rated as a good piece of work. During the course of analyzing the concordancing of this story we are providing a motivation for reading and raising language awareness and enhancing linguistic and stylistic and literary competence and “ learners are able to use literature as a way of increasing their knowledge of English as well as to enjoy literature as to enjoy literature in English in its own right.”( Tribble/Jones 1990:78)

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