Computational Stylistic Analysis of Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant

Abstract

A language is a communication tool for sharing ideas, emotions, and thoughts in spoken or writtenform. Writers use different linguistic structures to communicate their views for specific meanings.Stylistics aims at exploring such use of language to explore different lexical categories. The linguisticmodel of Leech and Short (2007) reveals the descriptive and interpretive nature of these lexicalcategories in Oscar Wilde’s (1888) ‘The Selfish Giant’ with the help of a computational tool known asAntConc. The mixed-method analysis of lexical categories shows the writer’s artistry to employdifferent lexical items with different frequencies to give meaning to the text. Six lexical categories withfrequency of 1490 were categorized as, 615 nouns (41Percent), 336 verbs (23 Percent), 293 conjunctions (20Percent), 137adverbs (9Percent), 91 adjectives (6Percent), and 18 particles (1Percent).