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248186

Orality vs. Literacy in Two of Arthur Miller’s Plays: A Corpus-Based Study

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Last updated: 25 Dec 2024

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Abstract

This study aims to compare the key protagonists in two masterpieces of Arthur Miller: Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (first published in 1955) and Quentin in After the Fall in terms of Ong's discursive orality and literacy features (Ong, 2013). Miller deployed a variety of linguistic features to reflect Willy's uneducated background vis-à-vis Quentin's literate-innate nature. The study employs up-to-date corpus methods in analyzing literary texts by which the researchers: firstly, constructed two corpora in XML format for both plays; secondly, marked up the character's lines before compiling and parsing the corpora; and thirdly, extracted a subcorpus for each character's speech in order to inspect, compare and contrast the linguistic aspects in question. The process renders 11,781 tokens for Willy's speech (representing 38.2% of the play) and 16,976 tokens for Quentin's (almost a half of the play's narration). Results affirm existential orality/literacy linguistic phenomena in Miller's protagonists as deemed by Ong, such as redundancy vs abundance. However, unlike Ong's presumption, both characters interdiscursively share certain language items, such as additives. In this sense, findings attest epistemological and cultural reflections that profile the common man's thoughts and concerns as Miller drew in his two literary works. His characters are realistically portrayed in a way that conforms with what has been previously argued by Negm (1986 & 1996) in his traditionally qualitative analysis of Miller's works. In other words, the present study complements and supplements Negm's previous studies in a quantitative method of analysis

DOI

10.21608/herms.2022.248186

Keywords

Orality, Literacy, Literary Discourse Analysis, Corpus Literary Analysis

Authors

First Name

Mohammed

Last Name

Negm

MiddleName

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Affiliation

Professor of Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Tanta University

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Orcid

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First Name

Waleed

Last Name

Mandour

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

Instructor of English Language Center for Preparatory Studies, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman

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City

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Orcid

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Volume

11

Article Issue

3

Related Issue

35480

Issue Date

2022-07-01

Receive Date

2022-07-05

Publish Date

2022-07-01

Page Start

71

Page End

100

Print ISSN

2090-8555

Online ISSN

2974-4695

Link

https://hermes.journals.ekb.eg/article_248186.html

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https://hermes.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=248186

Order

3

Type

المقالة الأصلية

Type Code

1,100

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

هرمس

Publication Link

https://hermes.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Orality vs. Literacy in Two of Arthur Miller’s Plays: A Corpus-Based Study

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Type

Article

Created At

22 Jan 2023