A corpus stylistic approach to Ernest Hemingway’s fiction: keywords and recurrent phrases in The Sun Also Rises

Abstract

Critics and readers alike revere Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises for its innovative writing style, characterised by omission and understatement, yet remaining semantically rich. However, the novel’s keywords and recurrent phrases, and their respective meanings, have received little attention, probably because they are dispersed across the text. Consequently, it is difficult to analyse their narrative significance in detail within their immediate textual context. Corpus methods can address this issue by systematically identifying such repeated linguistic patterns in the text and revealing the hidden themes they convey. This study adopts this approach, using a corpus methodology to analyse the keywords and most frequent four-word n-grams and p-frames in Hemingway’s debut novel, with the aim of demonstrating their contribution to the construction of its literary meanings.