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Book: Explorations in Stylistics

Chapter: Corpus linguistics, Systemic Functional Grammar and literary meaning: a critical analysis of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.21965

Blurb:

This chapter falls into two halves. In Part 1 the author uses a Critical Linguistic approach, based on Systemic Functional lexico-grammatical (SFG) analysis, to investigate how word frequency data and concordancing can help reveal the ideologies represented in the text. In Part 2 the author briefly argues that such an analysis gives only a partial view, and that, especially in the case of literature, the straightforward move from forms to meanings inherent in the semantic Critical Linguistics approach is problematised by factors such as propositional attitude.

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