Analyzing the Literary Evolution of an Author Using Corpus-Linguistic Tools: the Case of Pérez Galdós

Abstract

This article looks into the potential of corpus linguistic approaches in the analysis of the evolution of a literary author’s style throughout his career. To do so, the fictional narratives of Pérez Galdós (c. 6.4 million words) have been scrutinized. They have been processed with the software tool WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2016). The analysis has focused on the reporting of characters’ verbal discourse by the narrators of Galdós’s novels, paying special attention to the speech verb dijo. The corpus-based approach used to carry out the analysis has made it possible to quantify the frequency with which Galdós uses different discourse presentation strategies at different stages of his career, which has revealed a clear evolution as far as his craftsmanship is concerned. Due to length constraints, we have focused on his early novels, analyzing the role of dijo as a core element in textual building blocks relevant to the creation of fictional universes and fictional personalities. The analysis is meant to make a contribution to the still-emerging field of corpus stylistics in Spanish, illustrating how the analysis of literary works can benefit greatly from the use of innovative corpus tools.