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The Lancaster Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation Written Corpus was built to investigate the nature of
SW&TP in written narrative texts, and to test the model of S&TP
proposed in Leech and Short (1981).
A pilot corpus of 40,000 words of prose fiction was constructed in 1994
and a pilot sample of 40,000 words of newspaper texts was added in
1994-95. This work was funded by a grant from the Faculty
of Social Sciences at Lancaster University. The corpus was then
expanded in 1996-97 to approximately 260,000 words, following the award of
a British Academy Larger Research Grant (M-AN2314/APN/3489). The corpus is
divided into three narrative genres:
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Prose fiction
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Newspaper news reports
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(Auto)biography.
These three genres are then sub-divided into
'serious' and 'popular' sections.
More information about the Written Corpus can be found in the numerous
papers that have been published based on the project. Click on the
publications link on the left for full details of these. In addition to
these, a book based on the project is forthcoming from Routledge.
References
Leech, G. and Short, M. (1981) Style in Fiction. London:
Longman.
Short, M. and Semino, E. (forthcoming) Corpus Stylistics: The Presentation of Speech, Writing and Thought in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge. |
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