Eye language – body part collocations and textual contexts in the nineteenth-century novel

Citation

Mahlberg M, Wiegand V & Hennessey A (2020) Eye language – body part collocations and textual contexts in the nineteenth-century novel. In: Fesenmeier L & Novakova I (eds.) Phraseology and Stylistics of Literary Language/ Phraséologie et Stylistique de la Langue Littéraire. Lausanne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, p. 143–176.

Abstract
The description of body language is an important authorial technique of characterisation. In this chapter, we offer a corpus linguistic approach to the study of body language that enables us to combine detailed qualitative analysis with the observation of more general textual patterns. We take the example of the body part noun eyes to identify patterns of non-verbal communication. Our approach centres on the comparison of collocation across fictional speech, narration and suspensions, as a means to identify local textual functions of eye language. The general principles we demonstrate are applicable beyond the example of eyes to the study of body part nouns more generally. The analysis employs the CorporaCoCo R package, the web application CLiC, and it also makes use of semantic annotation with the USAS tagger.