Concordancing O. Henry's The Cop and The Anthem
A concordancer is one of the simplest but, at the same time, most powerful tools to elicit certain types of information-in a quick and effective way- from the diverse corpora available nowadays. Concordancers have been widely used in linguistics, above all in text-type studies which rely on quantitative analysis. There have been significant development in corpus linguistics during recent years. Yet linguistics is not the only field where concordancers may prove useful. Literary criticism might also be benefited from it. This paper argues for the use of concordances to literary texts.
As an extremely powerful hypothesis testing device on vast amounts of data, the computer allows controlled speculation, makes hidden structures visible, enhances at the same time imagination and checks it by inductivity, thus making higher degrees of objectivity possible. Here I choose as topic the plot and characterization and writing style in a famous short story by an American writer O. Henry, The Cop and The Anthem. The concordancing programs I use in this case is Wconcord and Wordsmith .
I load the text The Cop and The Anthem into Wordsmith. It provides some general statistics about the text:
Bytes13,892
Tokens2,374
Types965
Type/Token Ratio40.65
Standardised Type/Token48.85
Ave. Word Length4.54
Sentences117
Sent.length20.15
sd. Sent. Length16.66
Para. length1,187.00
sd. Para. length1,667.36
1-letter words85
2-letter words350
3-letter words563
4-letter words370
For this text the bytes is 13,892 and the tokens are 2,374 and the sentences are 117, which can be interpreted as a sign for a short text. Its token/ratio is 40.65.This can be interpreted as a sign for a middle-...
... middle of paper ...
... this story easily and clearly.
It’s just under the so-called capitalist democracy that Soapy attempted to seek for his special happiness from prison .He did so many evil things yet no policeman sent him to prison. Just when he was moved by an anthem and determined to start a new life he was captured by a policeman and tried for three months captivity in prison. Either on the plots or the characterization or the writing style O.Henry may be rated as a good piece of work. During the course of analyzing the concordancing of this story we are providing a motivation for reading and raising language awareness and enhancing linguistic and stylistic and literary competence and “ learners are able to use literature as a way of increasing their knowledge of English as well as to enjoy literature as to enjoy literature in English in its own right.”( Tribble/Jones 1990:78)
"Brooklyn Cop” written by Norman MacCaig, a Scottish poet, is about an American cop who roams the streets tackling crime. Our impression of the stereotypical cop changes throughout the poem as we find that he isn’t all that he is made out to be. This essay will look at how the cop is portrayed and the techniques used to give this impression of him.
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Diction plays a critical role in the development of the tone in a story. The type of words the author uses directly leads to the tone of the entire literary work. If ...
Capital punishment, a topic that is constantly debated, is questioned on whether or not it serves its purpose which is to deter criminals and if it is morally acceptable. It is my goal to evaluate arguments that promote or reject capital punishment and its deterrence factor. It would be beneficial comparing crime statistics for states that uphold and states that abolish capital punishment. Finally, an investigation of criminals facing the death penalty and their thoughts as well as modern prison conditions will provide insight to this debate. Capital punishment could be a great deterrent to crime or it may have no effect at all.
In conclusion, a great deal of tension and contrast between “dark” and “light” in The Inferno helps us to explore Dante’s self portrait—he fears dangerous desires and sinful darkness, but shows much courage and hope towards life since he nevertheless follows his guide Virgil to dive into horrible Hell. As shown in Canto I, such emotional reaction to dark and light symbols lays a great foundation for developing Dante’s broad and universal traits as his journey progresses.
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The disturbing description of the serial killer is recited without any waver whatsoever away from the intent only to divulge information. The narrator makes no personal comment and expresses no opinion about Howard. After the narrator has given the information to the listener, the narrator leads the train of thought right back to the work environment. The idea of a horrible mass murderer is interrupted by his typing ability. This continued contrast now goes past unstable and borders on psychotic.
Death penalty supporters believe that capital punishment is the only sure way to deter murderers from committing murders again. “The argument that murderers are the least likely of all criminals to repeat their crimes is not only irrelevant, but also increasingly false. Six percent of young adults paroled in 1978 after having been convicted of murder were arrested for murder again with six years of release” (Death Penalty Paper).
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