Investigating Syntactic Simplicity in Popular Fiction

Montoro, Rocío

doi:10.4324/9781351183222-5

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…The same critique was issued by Irwin as far back as 1976, which contended that fantasy is by definition stylistically plain. This contrasts with the findings by Montoro (2018) who, on the basis of a number of linguistic features and variables, concludes that fantasy is 'more syntactically complex' at the specific level of the Noun Phrase than other sub-genres of popular fiction, such as crime fiction, chick lit, and thriller. This apparent clash in terms of simplicity/complexity is discussed in depth in Section 4.…”

Section: The Language Of Fantasy and Tvcontrasting

confidence: 82%

“…In fantasy TV series, the over-representation of gonna highlights informality aspects associated with spoken language, the medium and perhaps even American English. The formality identified by Montoro (2018) with regard to written fantasy, therefore, appears to combine with the informality of certain other grammatical features ( gonna in this case) prototypically associated with popular culture forms in media other than the written one.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…However, the fact that fantasy overuses this verb form is also telling for a further reason. According to other scholars (Montoro, 2018), the syntactic characteristics of written fantasy with regard to the NP suggest that the genre is actually more formal than others in popular fiction. This apparent clash clearly points towards the need of inspecting the genre further to ascertain at which language level this apparent formality takes place.…”

Section: Pos Analysismentioning

confidence: 98%

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Telecinematic stylistics: Language and style in fantasy TV series

Castro

2023

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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The language of written fantasy has been amply studied, with extensive research on authors such as JR Tolkien, Robert E Howard, or Aldous Huxley. The study of television language, on the other hand, is attracting increasing attention, even though the scope of such research often encompasses a single TV show rather than whole genres. Given the renewed interest in all things fantasy, this study seeks to analyze the language of fantasy TV series from a corpus-stylistic perspective to open new paths for linguistic inquiry. First, I depart from a theoretical distinction that relies on Mandala’s (2012) overview of the field and James and Mendlesohn’s (2012) definitions of fantasy as a genre; I consider some of the traits they associate with written fantasy and propose a taxonomy of the different types of fantasy worlds in television. On the basis of this, I design my own TV fantasy corpus by sampling three episodes from fifteen American fantasy TV shows (2011-2021) and compare it against Davies’ TV Corpus (2021). Using a corpus-based approach, I implement a POS (part-of-speech) and semantic analysis of the corpus and consider whether, and if so how, the language of fantasy in television reflects the same characteristics scholars have identified in written fantasy and general television discourse. In doing so, I aim to contribute to the understanding of the style of fantasy as a genre and assess whether fantasy TV series are characterized by particular linguistic features.

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Section: The Language Of Fantasy and Tvcontrasting

confidence: 82%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Pos Analysismentioning

confidence: 98%

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Telecinematic stylistics: Language and style in fantasy TV series

Castro

2023

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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“…what counts as the “text”’ (Page et al, 2018: 4). While Montoro (2018a) utilises literary and popular fiction corpora to investigate syntactic simplicity in the latter, Mahlberg and Wiegand (2018) address the more canonical Great Expectations (1861). Canonical texts are also the focus of Bray’s (2018a) chapter on the novels of Jane Austen, but of course nobody is more aware than stylisticians of the fluidity of the canon (on canonical writing see also Shigematsu’s work on Defoe in this journal (27(2)), Ruano’s (2018a, 2018b) research on Dickens and Culpeper et al’s (2018) and Busse’s (2018) articles on Shakespeare).…”

Section: The Stylistic Motion: Backwards and Forwardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The year’s work in stylistics 2018

Statham¹,

Montoro

2019

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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The diachronic change of research article abstract difficulty across disciplines: a cognitive information-theoretic approach

Xin

Wei

2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Text difficulty refers to the ease with which a text can be read and understood, and the difficulty of research article abstracts has long been a hot topic. Previous studies have found that research article abstracts are difficult to read in general and that abstracts have gradually become more and more difficult. However, the widely used measurements, such as FRE and SMOG, have long been criticized in that they use only simplistic and surface-level indicators as proxies for complex cognitive processes of reading, and the sophisticated cognitive theory and Natural Language Processing/machine learning-based methods seem not that easy to use and interpret. A theoretically sound and methodologically neat measurement of text difficulty should be called for. Besides, the diachronic changes of abstract difficulty across disciplines have been under-researched. To address these issues, this study adopted a cognitive information-theoretic approach to investigate the diachronic change of text difficulty of research article abstracts across the areas of natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. 1890 abstracts were sampled over a period of 21 years, and two indexes, i.e. entropy from information theory and mean dependency distance from cognitive science, were employed for the calculation of cognitive encoding/decoding difficulty. The results show that in general, the cognitive encoding difficulty of abstracts has been increasing in the past two decades, while the cognitive decoding difficulty of abstracts has been decreasing. Regarding the disciplinary variations, the humanities show no significant diachronic change in encoding difficulty, and the social sciences show no significant diachronic change in decoding difficulty. These phenomena can be attributed to the traits of abstracts, the nature of academic knowledge, the cognitive mechanism in human languages and the features of different disciplines. This study has implications for the innovations in theories and methods of measurement of text difficulty, as well as an in-depth understanding of the disciplinary variations in academic writing and the essence of research article abstracts for research article writers, readers, the scientific community, and academic publishers.

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Investigating Syntactic Simplicity in Popular Fiction

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Telecinematic stylistics: Language and style in fantasy TV series

Telecinematic stylistics: Language and style in fantasy TV series

The year’s work in stylistics 2018

The diachronic change of research article abstract difficulty across disciplines: a cognitive information-theoretic approach

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