A Corpus-Assisted Stylistic Analysis of Parallelism in Virginia Woolf 's Short Fiction

Abstract

Parallelism is one of the linguistic concepts that literary texts carry. As a stylistic device, it occurs at various linguistic levels (phonological, graphological, morphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic). This research examines the employment of parallelism by Virginia Woolf in her short fiction writing. It attempts to detect the conspicuousness of phonological,lexical, syntactic and semantic parallelisms and their contribution to the characterization of Woolfian short fiction's style. The study adopts a corpus-assisted approach through the use of the corpus toolkit "AntConc" as a supplementary tool in the analysis. That makes the analysis of quantitative as well as quantitative perspectives. The findings show that, for several purposes, on different occasions and in many positions, all types of linguistic parallelism are used in the Woolfian Corpus (W.Cor.). To a considerable extent, the Woolfian short fiction is marked by the artistic fabric that parallelism creates in quality and quantity.