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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp.1117-1136
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Sep 2026
Received 28 Jun 2026 Revised 08 Aug 2026 Accepted 23 Aug 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202609.1117

A Corpus Stylistic Analysis of Linguistic Differences in James Joyce’s Literary Texts

Jisu Ryu ; Hye-Soo Lee ; Hyenyeong Chung ; Moongee Jeon
(First author) Lecturer, Department of English Language & Literature Konkuk University jsryu0508@konkuk.ac.kr
Professor, Department of English Language & Literature Konkuk University hyesoo@konkuk.ac.kr
Researcher, The Konkuk Research Institute for Multilingualism and Multiculturalism Konkuk University chn4050@konkuk.ac.kr
(Corresponding author) Professor, Department of English Language & Literature Konkuk University 120 Neungdong-ro, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, Korea, Tel: +82-2-450-3356 mjeon1@konkuk.ac.kr


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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study conducts a corpus stylistic analysis of James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (hereafter Portrait). The two texts were selected for their literary significance and for exhibiting stylistic tendencies commonly associated with literary naturalism and modernism, respectively. While previous studies have discussed stylistic differences between these literary movements primarily through qualitative interpretation, relatively little research has attempted to examine such distinctions using quantitative linguistic evidence. Employing 26 indices from Coh-Metrix, a multilevel corpus analysis tool, this study investigates how linguistic features reflect the contrasting narrative strategies and thematic concerns of the two texts. The results reveal statistically significant differences across most linguistic measures. Portrait exhibits greater syntactic complexity, lower readability, and lower cohesion, reflecting the introspective and fragmented nature of modernist narrative and its use of stream-of-consciousness techniques. In contrast, Dubliners demonstrates greater discourse cohesion, lexical accessibility, and environmental grounding, consistent with stylistic tendencies associated with literary naturalism. The text also shows more frequent lexical repetition and negation, features that reinforce its thematic concern with paralysis and determinism. Additional differences in pronoun use, temporal cohesion, and spatial reference further distinguish the two works at both sentence and discourse levels. These findings provide empirical support for previously proposed stylistic distinctions between naturalist and modernist writing and demonstrate the value of quantitative corpus stylistic methods as a complement to traditional qualitative approaches in literary analysis.

Keywords:

literary texts, corpus stylistics, multilevel text analysis, Coh-Metrix

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2023S1A5B5A17085507).

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