Narrative descriptions in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. A corpus stylistics perspective
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8745
Lo studio qui presentato presenta metodi di corpus stylistics per investigare lo stile narrativo di Stephenie Meyer in The Twilight Saga (2005-2008). In particolare lo studio si basa ulle keyword generate da Wordsmith Tools version 7 (Scott 2017) e BNC come corpus di riferimento. Analisi quantitive e qualitative dimostrano come i termini più frequenti riflettano l'attenzione dell'autore verso dettagli fisici dei personaggi. In particolare, i nomi denotano attributi fisici, gli aggettivi caratterizzano personaggi e ambientazione, mentre i verbi presentano le azioni dei personaggi, la loro interazione e la loro collocazione nella narrazione.
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Francesca Coccetta
Umanistica Digitale
corpus-based discourse analysis
Narrative descriptions in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. A corpus stylistics perspective.
Text.Serial.Journal
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/
Articles
2019-09-03
2018-12-04
2019-09-03
2020-05-19
Um. Dig.
Francesca Coccetta
2019/09/03
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8745
Ca’ Foscari Università di Venezia
2532-8816
6
corpus-based discourse analysis
en
Narrative descriptions in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. A corpus stylistics perspective.
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/8745/9379
      Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 - n.6, 2019
D. Cesiri, F. Coccetta – Narrative descriptions in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga. A corpus
stylistics perspective
DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8745


    Narrative descriptions in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight
            Saga. A corpus stylistics perspective

                                  Daniela Cesiri – Francesca Coccetta

                                       Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
                                     daniela.cesiri@unive.it
                                   francesca.coccetta@unive.it




        Abstract. The present study draws on corpus stylistics (cf. [38]; [19]; [26]; [20], to name
        a few) to investigate the narrative style in Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga (2005-
        2008). In particular, it focuses on keywords generated using Wordsmith Tools version 7
        [36], and the BNC as a reference corpus. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that
        the most frequent lexical words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) reflect the writer’s focus on
        carefully selected physical elements of the characters. More specifically, the nouns
        preferentially denote specific physical attributes of the characters, the adjectives provide a
        general description of the protagonists and the setting, while the verbs used present the
        actions of all the characters, their interaction with the other protagonists, and their
        position in the narrative situation.
        Lo studio qui presentato presenta metodi di corpus stylistics (cf. [38]; [19]; [26]; [20])
        per investigare lo stile narrativo di Stephenie Meyer in The Twilight Saga (2005-2008). In
        particolare lo studio si basa ulle keyword generato da Wordsmith Tools version 7 [36] e
        BNC come corpus di riferimento. Analisi quantitive e qualitative dimostrano come i
        termini più frequenti riflettano l'attenzione dell'autore verso dettagli fisici dei personaggi.
        In particolare, i nomi denotano attributi fisici, gli aggettivi caratterizzano personaggi e
        ambientazione, mentre i verbi presentano le azioni dei personaggi, la loro interazione e la
        loro collocazione nella narrazione.



        Introduction1

Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight Saga is regarded as a popular-culture phenomenon which has
attracted the attention not only of the media but also of the academic community. Academics
(e.g. Anatol [1]; Morey [27]) have described the themes of the books, identified its intertextual
links with other novels, criticized Meyers’ deviation from the conventions of the Vampire Tale,
but, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, they seem to have neglected stylistic analyses of the
1   The research is the result of a joint effort of the two authors. However, Francesca Coccetta wrote
    Sections 1 and 2, while Daniela Cesiri wrote Sections 3 to 5.


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Saga from a linguistic perspective. Yet style, defined by Leech and Short ([22]: 9) as “the way in
which language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose, and so on”,
can contribute to the success of a book [2].
Stylistics, as a branch of linguistic studies, adopts the theoretical and methodological principles
of modern linguistics to analyze particularly literary and highly creative texts. Inter alia,
stylistics aims to pinpoint a text’s features which distinguish it from other texts as well as an
author from one or more other authors. It also explores the linguistic choices made by writers
in their texts and the particular effects and impressions they produce in readers. Examples of
stylistic analyses can be found in Spitzer [42], Halliday [17] and Leech and Short [21], just to
mention a few. In the pre-computer era, stylistic analyses were carried out manually, which
made it difficult to identify the specific linguistic features across a whole text or collections of
texts [44]. In addition, they focused on a few carefully selected linguistic features, thus raising
doubts about their objectivity (e.g. Fish [14]). With the advent of corpus stylistics, that is the
use of corpus linguistics methods of analysis to the study of literary texts, empirical evidence for
the linguistic features creating these effects can now be easily provided. The present study draws
on corpus stylistics to investigate the style associated with The Twilight Saga. In particular, it
aims to explore whether particularly crafty linguistic choices can be said to create original
stylistic effects.


        Literature review

In the last decades, stylistic analysis of literary texts has benefited from corpus linguistics
methodologies which have provided evidence in support of stylistic judgements. Corpus
stylistics, as this sub-branch of stylistics is called, has facilitated the identification of particular
effects produced in literary texts as varied as novels, drama and poetry. One of the basic tenets
of stylistics is that writers’ creative ways of using language basically consists in deviations from
linguistic norms. In this respect, Stubbs ([46]: 5) affirms that:


        individual texts can be explained only against a background of what is normal and
        expected in general language use, and this is precisely the comparative information that
        quantitative corpus data can provide.

As a result, a text’s stylistic features can be identified by its comparison with other texts. As
Mahlberg ([24]: 221) states, corpus stylistics


        help[s] with the analysis of an individual text by providing various options for the
        comparison of one text with groups of other texts to identify tendencies, intertextual
        relationships, or reflections of social and cultural contexts.

Corpus-stylistic studies have adopted three main approaches [3] which focus on keywords,
collocations and clusters. In corpus linguistics, keyword analysis compares and contrasts the


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frequency of the words in a given corpus with the frequency of the same words in a reference
corpus [35]. The words occurring with unusual frequency, or ‘keyness’, in that corpus, are
indeed keywords. In literary studies, keyword analysis has been used to investigate
characterization (i.e. the way in which a fictional character is constructed) and a text’s subject
matter (or ‘aboutness’, [35]). But keyword analysis can also provide information about a text’s
style. In this respect, Culpeper [11] observes that keywords correspond to ‘style markers’ in
stylometry, which are defined as “those linguistic items that only appear, or are most or least
frequent in, one group of contexts” ([13]: 34).
The use of keywords for a text’s stylistic description is well illustrated by studies into
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Culpeper ([9], [11]), for instance, analyses characterization in
Romeo and Juliet. In particular, he considers how the six characters who speak the most in the
play, namely Romeo, Juliet, Friar Lawrence, Nurse, Capulet and Mercutio, are shaped in their
speech. To do so, he compiles six corpora, each consisting of the speech produced by one of the
above-mentioned characters, and compares and contrasts each corpus with the speech of the
other five characters. Culpeper analyzes the keywords of each character and observes predictable
and unpredictable findings. For example, Romeo’s frequent use of the words ‘beauty’ and ‘love’
comes as no surprise. By contrast, Juliet’s frequent use of the grammatical words ‘if’, ‘yet’, ‘or’,
‘would’ and ‘be’ (mostly subjunctive) is not as easily predictable. In Culpeper’s view, these can
be interpreted as indication of her constant state of anxiety throughout the tragedy.
Research into Romeo and Juliet from a corpus stylistic perspective is carried out by Scott and
Tribble [37], too. In their study, they analyze the keyword list of the tragedy by using all
Shakespeare’s plays (tragedies, comedies and histories) as a reference corpus. The keyword list
provides words reflecting the play’s theme (i.e. its aboutness). A case in point are the words
‘love’, ‘lips’, ‘light’, ‘night’, ‘death’ and ‘poison’. For example, ‘love’ and ‘death’ clearly signal the
main subject of the play, that is the love between Romeo and Juliet and their death – in passing
we may recall that Romeo dies by drinking poison which is one of the keywords identified by
Scott and Tribble [37]. The keywords ‘light’ and ‘dark’ provide evidence of the widespread use
of the imagery of light and dark discussed by many academics including the literary critic
Spurgeon [43]. In addition, the keyword list provides words reflecting the play’s style. This is
illustrated by the exclamations ‘Ah’ and ‘O’, the pronoun ‘thou’, the verbs ‘art’ (the second
person singular form of ‘be’) and ‘wilt’, and the pronoun ‘she’. Scott and Tribble’s analysis
shows that the exclamations are unevenly distributed among the characters: Juliet, Romeo and
the Nurse are those who use them the most; in addition, some minor characters, particularly
Peter, the Nurse’s personal servant, use them more than one might expect. Moreover, the
exclamations ‘Ah’ and ‘Oh’ – whose occurrence has also been commented on by literary critics
(e.g. Crystal, [8]; Blake [5]) – are both used in mockery; also, ‘Ah’ is more frequent in a
negative context (e.g. “Ah, well a’day he’s dead) than ‘O’ is (e.g. O sweet Juliet). Instead, the use
of ‘art’ after ‘thou’ “reflect[s] the intimate nature of the theme” ([37]: 60).
As Scott and Tribble’s study demonstrates, corpus linguistics can help literary critics provide
more thorough insights into the use of language in a text. This is highlighted by Stubbs [46] in
his study on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Specifically, he illustrates that the use of corpus-


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linguistics methods of analysis can provide quantitative data to support the subjective
interpretations of a book already widely accepted in literary studies, but also identify linguistic
features overlooked by stylisticians. In particular, Stubbs considers, inter alia, vague expressions
and word distribution. Literary critics (e.g. Watt [47]) have observed that one of the major
themes of the book is Marlow’s unreliable and distorted knowledge and pointed out that this
theme is detectable in the frequent use of content words from the lexical field of mist (e.g.
‘dusk’, ‘fog’, ‘haze’, ‘mist/misty’, ‘smoke’) as well the adjectives ‘vague’ and ‘indistinct’.
However, Stubbs demonstrates that this is also conveyed by grammatical words denoting
vagueness and uncertainty including ‘something’, ‘somebody’, ‘sometimes’, ‘somewhere’,
‘somehow’, ‘some’, ‘kind of ’ and ‘sort of’. Considering that word distribution can reveal
something about the text structure, Stubbs observes that the words ‘heart’, ‘dark’ and ‘darkness’
are present throughout the book, but more frequent at the end “when the story almost becomes
too dark – too dark altogether” ([46]: 12, italics in the original).
Similarly to Stubbs [46], O’Halloran (2007) analyses James Joyce’s short story Eveline, showing
how corpus stylistics “can help say new things about a canonical and much analyzed literary
work” ([34]: 228) in an objective way. In his view, this reduces the arbitrariness that typically
characterizes stylistic analyses and interpretations, even the most rigorous ones. In his study,
O’Halloran considers the distribution of the following keywords across the three major phases
of the story identified by the critic Hart [18] and confirmed by Stubbs’ [45] software analysis
of the story: 1) the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’, used to refer to Eveline only; and 2) ‘would’ used
to realize free indirect thought. He compares the log likelihoods of the these keywords with
BNC-baby and reaches the conclusion that they act as implicit clues in the story indicating that
Eveline is unlikely to leave Dublin for Buenos Aires.
Another approach used in corpus-stylistic studies focuses on collocation, that is the frequent
co-occurrence of two words within a given span. Collocations create connotations or semantic
prosody [40], that is, evaluative meanings which are either positive or negative. Semantic
prosody helps explain the stylistic effect of a given expression as illustrated by Louw [23]. An
example of analysis of semantic prosody is provided in the above-mentioned study carried out
by Stubbs [46] on Heart of Darkness. He shows that the word ‘glitter’ collocates with ‘dark’,
‘sombre’, ‘gloom’ and ‘infernal stream’, and ‘gleam’ collocates with ‘blood’ and ‘fire’, thus
connotating dangerous and ominous things.
One final approach adopted by corpus-stylistic studies relies on the notion of cluster 2 [35], that
is a repeated sequence of words. Again, Stubbs’ [46] study is a good example of cluster analysis
in literary texts. He observes that the top four-word clusters relate to Marlow’s uncertainty (e.g.
‘it seemed to me’ and ‘as though I had’) and geographical space (e.g. ‘the depths of the’), central
themes of the book. Another example is to be found in the work by Mahlberg [25]. She argues
that “clusters can be interpreted as textual building blocks for fictional worlds” ([25]: 26) and
shows the validity of her argument in her study on Charles Dickens’s fiction [25] with respect
to characterization. Her findings show that some clusters contain expressions referring to
characters as is the case of ‘inspector bucket of the detective’ and ‘man with the wooden leg’.
2   The term ‘cluster’ corresponds to Biber et al.’s [4] ‘lexical bundle’ and to Fletcher’s [16] ‘n-gram’,
    namely sequences of words.


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Another example of cluster analysis is Fisher-Starcke’s [15] work on Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice, where she investigates four-word clusters and their role in structuring the text. In
particular, she identifies clusters expressing temporal sequence (e.g. ‘at the same time’, ‘in the
course of’, ‘as soon as they’ and ‘as soon as he’) and the speed of the events which occur in
quick succession. The clusters ‘I do not know’, ‘I am sure I’, ‘and I dare say’, ‘I am sure you’
and ‘I hope you will’ indicate the key role of direct speech characterized by the self-
referentiality expressed by the personal pronoun ‘I’ typical of spoken discourse. Fisher-Starcke
also observes the occurrence of different personal pronouns in the clusters which indicate the
use of the omniscient narrator.
The above studies show that corpus linguistics methods are fruitfully applied to the
investigation of stylistic features of literary texts. Drawing on these studies, the present research
examines stylistic features of The Twilight Saga. In particular, it adopts the quantitative and
qualitative approach to the study of keywords that are found in the four books of the Saga.


       Corpus and Methodology


       The Twilight Saga
The four books composing The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer were published between
2005 and 2008. Since the publication of the first book, the series has become extremely
popular among the readers it was first aimed at, i.e. young adults. Indeed, the literary genre in
which it can be categorized is the young-adult, vampire-themed novel. The book series became
so popular that it was adapted into five movies, hitting immediate box office success, thus
becoming a literary as well as a blockbuster case.
The plot narrates the love story between a human teenage girl, Isabella (Bella) Swan, and
vampire Edward Cullen, who looks like a teenage boy himself but is actually more than 100
years old. The story develops around the fulfillment of the romance between the two main
characters as well as around the many obstacles they face in both the humans’ and the vampires’
world. The story is narrated mostly from Bella’s viewpoint except for one part in the fourth
book, which is narrated from the standpoint of Jacob Black, a werewolf and Bella’s best friend.
Both the book series and the movie saga have encountered positive and negative reception. The
book series became popular among the public of teenage readers (mostly girls). However, it has
also attracted harsh criticism. Literary critics writing for newspapers such as The New York
Times, The Washington Post, and some websites have disparaged its plot development and poor
personality characterization of the protagonists. According to Miller [32],


       the characters, such as they are, are stripped down to a minimum, lacking the texture and
       idiosyncrasies of actual people […]. Twilight would be a lot more persuasive as an
       argument that an ‘amazing heart’ counts for more than appearances if it didn't harp so



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       incessantly on Edward’s superficial splendors.

Moreover, academics as well have analyzed the Saga, mostly criticizing its promotion and
romanticization of an abusive relationship among young girls. For instance, Collins &
Carmody ([7]: 389-390) state that


       the presentation of these behaviors in popular fiction clearly does not cause dating
       violence. However, it is troubling when one of the most popular book series in recent
       history repeatedly normalizes, minimizes, and romanticizes these behaviors. It reinforces
       cultural norms that condone men’s use of force to obtain a variety of goals.



       Aims and procedure
The present study collects into a corpus the four books of the Saga to investigate them from a
quantitative and a qualitative viewpoint, using the software for corpus analysis Wordsmith Tools
Version 7.0 [36]. The quantitative analysis identifies the most frequently occurring keywords,
subsequently divided according to grammatical categories such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
Then, the qualitative analysis looks at the context and co-text of occurrence of the individual
items. The aim is to find out narrative patterns emerging from Meyer’s books in order to
understand if the criticism against the books comes from their actual characteristics or from a
biased view of the series.


       Data Analysis


       Quantitative Analysis
The quantitative part of the analysis uses as reference corpus the BNC (British National
Corpus) [6]. It is a wide corpus of general English, comprising samples of written and spoken
language, compiled between the 1990s and 2007. Despite the fact that the BNC is a corpus of
British English, it was nonetheless chosen because it was considered more appropriate as a
reference corpus than other corpora available for American English.
First, we can mention the Open National American Corpus (ONAC). It can be searched
through SketchEngine (http://www.sketchengine.eu), an online platform for corpus
investigation, which also permits the upload of one’s ‘personal’ corpus as well as the creation of
wordlists and keywords, just like Wordsmith Tools, using as reference corpora that are already
available on the platform itself. However, the ONAC is divided into two separate sections, one
for the spoken component and the other one for the written components. The Twilight Saga
books contain narrative parts as well as a consistent amount of dialogue, supposedly
reproducing spontaneous speech. Thus, it was important to have spoken and written language
represented into one, single reference corpus. Moreover, works of fiction represent only 5% of
the written component of the ONAC (http://www.anc.org/data/masc/corpus/), while in the

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BNC           fiction        represents     27%        of                          the              corpus
(http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/URG/BNCdes.html#BNCcompo).
Another corpus of American English is the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American
English). COCA “contains more than 560 million words of text (20 million words each year
1990-2017) and it is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers,
and academic texts” (https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/). So, it would have been the ideal
candidate as reference corpus. However, the corpus is accessible, and can be searched, only
through its dedicated website, which does not permit the comparison of data with other
corpora, as is the case of the Wordlist and Keyword tools in Wordsmith Tools and in
SketchEngine. Thus, for the reasons just stated, neither ONAC nor COCA were considered
viable for this study.


                                 Twilight Saga     BNC
   Tokens                        626,799           97,860,872
   Types                         15,699            512,588
   Type/Token Ratio              2.50              0.52
   STTR                          41.69             42.66
   Average word length           4.04              4.68
   Number of sentences           60,974            4,754,513
   Average sentence length       22.54             20.59
Table 1: Quantitative data from The Twilight Saga book series


Table 1 illustrates the quantitative data of the two corpora. As we can see, the STTR
(Standardized Type-Token Ratio) in The Twilight Saga corpus indicates that it is lexically dense,
namely rich in word use. Moreover, the average word length shows that the words are quite
long. This means that they are content words, confirming the first interpretation of the STTR
figure. The last row in Table 1 shows that the average sentence length in The Twilight Saga
corpus is higher than in the reference corpus. This indicates that the sentences are long, a
feature that, according to de Haan and van Esch ([12]: 198), is typical of “a more formal style”.
In sum, quantitative data from The Twilight Saga corpus indicate that the writing style presents
a complex construction of long sentences rich in content words. This might be explained by
the fact that the book is narrated from Bella’s point of view; indeed, it is rich in descriptions
from her perspective, narrations of memories, soliloquies, and does not report a great amount
of dialogues between the characters, as the following quotation from the first book of the Saga
([28]: 163) exemplifies:


       “A very dangerous one,” he murmured. We were both silent then. I watched the
       headlights twist with the curves of the road. They moved too fast; it didn’t look real, it
       looked like a video game. I was aware of the time slipping away so quickly, like the black



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         road beneath us, and I was hideously afraid that I would never have another chance to be
         with him like this again – openly, the walls between us gone for once. His words hinted
         at an end, and I recoiled from the idea. I couldn’t waste one minute I had with him.

As we can see from the example, brief lines of dialogue are followed by longer parts, in which
Bella describes her thoughts and reflections on the situation. Moreover the vampire characters
engage in long conversations, especially when they need to discuss their strategy of defense or
offence when they fear an attack from enemy clans of vampires, as in the following example
([30]: 389), in which one of the members of Edward’s family, Jasper, expresses his opinion on
some attacks and threats that were posed to Bella’s safety:


         “Hmm,” he finally said. “It’s possible. I still think the Volturi are most likely ... But your
         theory — there’s something there. Victoria’s personality. Your theory suits her personality
         perfectly. She’s shown a remarkable gift for self-preservation from the start — maybe it’s a
         talent of hers. In any case, this plot would put her in no danger at all from us, if she sits
         safely behind and lets the newborns wreak their havoc here. And maybe little danger from
         the Volturi, either. Perhaps she’s counting on us to win, in the end, though certainly not
         without heavy casualties of our own. But no survivors from her little army to bear witness
         against her. In fact,” he continued, thinking it through, “if there were survivors, I’d bet
         she’d be planning to destroy them herself.... Hmm. Still, she’d have to have at least one
         friend who was a bit more mature. No fresh-made newborn left your father alive....”



         Qualitative Analysis
The qualitative analysis proceeded from the extraction of the twenty most frequent lexical
words found through the corpus search. It must be said that clusters were also taken into
consideration, as one of the approaches normally found in corpus stylistics (see Literature
review). However, for The Twilight Saga the search for clusters did not produce relevant results
to be considered for analysis in the present study. First of all, a list of keywords was generated
by using Wordsmith Tools Version 7.0 and, then, from this list the most frequent nouns, lexical
verbs and adjectives were chosen. The analysis concentrated on the twenty most recurrent items
for each category, as Table 2 illustrates, with the items in each group listed in order of
frequency as they appear in the keyword list.


 Nouns         Proper nouns: Edward, Jacob, Bella, Alice, Charlie, Carlisle, Jasper, Sam
               Common nouns: eyes, face, voice, head, hand, door, room, hands, expression,
               arms, moment, sound
 Adjectiv      hard, dark, wrong, deep, sorry, cold, alone, fine, perfect, afraid, quiet, strange,
 es            beautiful, warm, fast, safe, empty, angry, calm, stupid
 Verbs         ask*, look*, felt, knew, seem*, turn*, tell, try*, fell, whisper*, stare*, tried, want*,
               sigh*, hear*, smile*, pull*, laugh*, start*, shook
Table 2: Twenty most frequent lexical words from the corpus


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The wildcard asterisk (*) in the verb row was used to extract any possible variant form from the
corpus. A categorization of the three groups of lexical words was adopted to help the detection
of the lexical choices made by Stephenie Meyer. This categorization was also functional to the
analysis of collocates in the concordance search of the corpus. More specifically, the group of
nouns contains the two categories of proper and common nouns, while Biber et al. [4] was
consulted to identify the categories of the adjectives and lexical verbs retrieved in the corpus (as
explained in the paragraphs below).
As Table 2 shows, the most frequent proper nouns used in The Twilight Saga are,
unsurprisingly, those of the main characters: the three main protagonists (i.e. Edward, Jacob
and Bella), Bella’s father (Charlie), the members of Edward’s family (i.e. Alice, Carlisle and
Jasper), and one of the werewolves (Sam). What is interesting to notice is that, although it is
Bella’s voice that narrates the story, her name appears in third position, close to the names of
Edward and Jacob. In this case, the occurrence of her name is probably due not to its use in
narrative passages, but as an ‘address’ term, namely when the other characters address Bella
directly in the dialogues, as in the sentence: ““Bella,” she [Bella’s mother] wrote... Why haven’t
you e-mailed me yet? What are you waiting for? Mom” ([28]: 33).
The adjectives identified as most frequent in the corpus mostly fall under the category of
‘descriptors’ ([4]: 598-599), which include the semantic groupings of adjectives denoting
color/brightness, size-quantity-extent (denoting size, weight, extent), time (denoting
chronology, age, frequency), and evaluative/emotive (denoting judgements, affect, emphasis).
As we can see in Table 2, the most recurrent adjectives in The Twilight Saga are those belonging
to the grouping of color (e.g. ‘dark’), thus indicating the external features of the reality
experienced by Bella, and those belonging to the grouping of evaluative/emotive, indicating
Bella’s perception of people, events and situations (such as ‘sorry’, ‘alone’, ‘afraid’).
In the case of verbs, too, the most frequent ones are ‘experiential verbs’, namely those that
narrate Bella’s perception of events. Using Biber et al.’s ([4]: 361-364) terminology, we can see
that they include verbs that belong to ‘activity verbs’ referring to actions and events with an
agent (e.g., ‘turn’, ‘stare’), ‘communication verbs’ referring to communication activities such as
speaking and writing (such as ‘ask’ and ‘whisper’), ‘mental verbs’ pertaining non-physical
activities and states (such as ‘laugh’, ‘sigh’), ‘verbs of existence or relationship’ (e.g., ‘seem’), and
‘aspectual verbs’ indicating the progress of some event or activity (e.g., ‘start’).


        Collocations
The qualitative analysis subsequently considered the collocates that accompany the three
categories of lexical words in Table 2. The concordances thus generated showed interesting
results for a restricted number of words, mostly adjectives and nouns. For the present analysis, a
few case studies were selected to illustrate the narrative style in The Twilight Saga, namely the
noun ‘eyes’, and the pairs of adjectives ‘black’/‘dark’ and ‘cold’/‘warm’. These (pairs of ) terms
were selected because they appeared to the writers of the present study to be relevant to
recurrent thematic foci of the novel. In particular, the noun ‘eyes’ was chosen because Meyer


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devotes a great deal of effort to describe the color of the protagonists’ eyes, how it changes in
the vampires and how this is in contrast with humans’ eyes. The adjectives ‘cold/warm’ were
selected because the text makes frequent reference to the contrast between the human body’s
warmth and the coldness of the vampires’ touch, or the scenes when Bella searches for warmth
in contrast to the outdoors inclement weather in the town of Forks (WA, where the books are
set). Finally, ‘black/dark’ were selected because the author lingers on the description of gloomy
atmosphere to provide a sort of ‘gothic-like’ aura to the books, meeting the readers’
expectations towards a vampire-themed novel. The aim of the analysis of the concordances
referring to these node words was to ascertain if – and to what extent – the insistence of the
author on the development of specific themes was reflected linguistically in her narrative
descriptions.


         Eyes
As already mentioned, the books contain constant remarks to the characters’ eye color. The
concordance search showed that the noun ‘eyes’ preferably collocates with description adjectives
belonging to the categories of ‘color’ (Examples from 1 to 3) and ‘evaluative/emotive’
(Examples from 4 to 6, emphases added):3
     •    1. His [Mike’s] clear blue eyes were not as eager now (New Moon);
     •    2. I could see Victoria’s face, her lips pulled back over her teeth, her crimson eyes
          glowing with the obsession of her vendetta (Eclipse);
     •    3. His [Edward’s] liquid topaz eyes were suddenly shining with excitement (Eclipse);
     •    4. Billy still stared at me with intense, anxious eyes (Twilight);
     •    5. Emmett’s laughter stopped at once, and he studied me with appraising eyes
          (Eclipse).
     •    6. Edward nodded, his tense eyes following Eleazar as he spoke (Breaking Dawn).
As we can see from Examples (1) to (3) above, the description of the color is only functional to
the portrayal of some specific emotion expressed by the character, whereas Examples (4) to (6)
show that, whenever the emotion prevails over any physical description, the color of the eyes is
not mentioned. This is particularly relevant in the case of the vampire characters, since their
changeable eye color is often used by Meyer to express some kind of emotion (as in Example
2).


         Cold/Warm
The analysis of collocates shows that, in the pair of adjectives ‘cold’/‘warm’, ‘cold’ is used to
describe the weather and the vampires (Examples 7 and 8), while ‘warm’ refers to the warmth

3   In the examples provided here, and in the next subsections, the boldface highlights the specific
    collocates in which the selected keywords occur in the corpus.


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   D. Cesiri, F. Coccetta – Narrative descriptions in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga. A corpus
                                                                           stylistics perspective

of the humans and the werewolves (Examples 9 and 10):
              •    7. The door opened again, and the cold wind suddenly gusted through the
                   room (Twilight);
              •    8. Alice interrupted this time, touching my cheek with her cold fingers
                   (Twilight);
              •    9. He [Jacob] took my face in his enormous, too-warm hands and held it
                   just a few inches from his (New Moon);
              •    10. His [Edward’s] skin was as icy as ever, but the trail his fingers left on
                   my skin was alarmingly warm (Twilight).
Example (8) reported above refers to fingers, but the concordances show that reference to the
cold body of the vampires is given to other individual parts such as ‘hands’, ‘breath’, and ‘lips’
rather than to the body as a whole. As we can see in Example (10), in particular, ‘warm’ is used
to contrast Bella’s temperature with Edward’s and to refer to the werewolves (in human and
wolf form), as in Example 9.


       Black/Dark
The different uses of ‘black’/’dark’ in the book series are illustrated in Examples (11) to (15):
              •    11. In his [Jacob’s] place was a large red-brown wolf with black eyes
                   (Twilight);
              •    12. There’s much that we need.” His black eyes flickered to the cup that
                   Bella was holding so tight (Breaking Dawn);
              •    13. He [Jacob] slowed the car to a crawl, turning to stare at me with his
                   dark eyes wide and earnest (Eclipse).
              •    14. His [Jacob’s] dark eyes were glistening with tears. A lump filled my
                   throat (New Moon).
              •    15. He [Edward] was glaring down at me again, his black
                   eyes full of revulsion (Twilight).
As the examples illustrates, the collocations show that ‘black’ is used for the purely physical
description of the color of the eyes (as in 11 and 12), while ‘dark’ is used to describe the color
of the eyes when this is typically associated to a situation in which there is some emotional
connotation (as in 13 and 14). The only exception is represented by Example 15, in which the
adjective ‘black’ together with some emotional state is used when the character is described for
the first time.




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     Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 - n.6, 2019


       Conclusions

The present study illustrated one of the practical applications of corpus stylistics to the
investigation of literary works, namely the analysis of keywords and their collocates in the
corpus under investigation. When the vampire-themed saga for young adults Twilight was first
published, it attracted harsh criticism despite its success among the public of teenage readers.
As stated in Section 3, some sociologists attacked its romantic portrayal of an abusive
relationship that could set a negative example in such a young public, while literary critics
attacked the books for their lack of in-depth characters’ analysis and poor plot development.
The aim of the study was to ascertain if a corpus-based linguistic investigation could confirm or
reject the critics’ opinions.
The keyword and collocation analysis established that the narrative choices present in The
Twilight Saga are predictable and reflect the first impression that a reader gets from reading the
books. The main focus of the descriptions is on the characters’ external perception of physical
attributes rather than inner qualities, as shown by the use of nouns such as ‘eyes’, ‘face’, and
‘expression’ (Table 2). Even the perception of emotions is filtered through the description of
body parts such as the eyes, the appearance, and the reactions of the characters. In conclusion,
the present analysis basically provides support for critics’ interpretations ([32]; [7]), namely that
the Saga’s success was due to a clever marketing campaign rather than to its intrinsic literary
merits.


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Last URLs access: May 16, 2019.




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