Computer‐Assisted Methods of Analyzing Textual and Intertextual Competence
Michael Stubbs · 2015
Individual texts are interpreted against a background of norms of usage in the language as a whole and/or in specific genres. Texts seem “natural” and “idiomatic” if they fit our expectations in terms of frequent phraseology. This is illustrated by using computer-assisted methods to compare a fragment of a non-fiction text about the environment with norms of usage as sampled in a large computer-readable corpus. There is no sharp distinction between mechanisms of cohesion in non-fiction and fiction texts, but literary texts do reveal other ways of exploiting intertextuality. This is illustrated using a well-known short story by James Joyce