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Lexical Trends in Young Adult Literature: a Corpus-Based Approach

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Lexical Trends in Young Adult Literature: a Corpus-Based Approach Brigham Young University BYU ScholarsArchive Theses and Dissertations 2016-03-01 Lexical Trends in Young Adult Literature: A Corpus-Based Approach Kyra McKinzie Nelson Brigham Young University - Provo Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd Part of the Linguistics Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Nelson, Kyra McKinzie, "Lexical Trends in Young Adult Literature: A Corpus-Based Approach" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. 5805. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5805 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Lexical Trends in Young Adult Literature: A Corpus-Based Approach Kyra McKinzie Nelson A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Jesse Egbert, Chair Mark Davies Dee Gardner Department of Linguistics and English Language Brigham Young University March 2016 Copyright © 2016 Kyra McKinzie Nelson All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Lexical Trends in Young Adult Literature: A orpus- ased pproach Kyra McKinzie NelsonC B A Department of Linguistics and English Language, BYU Master of Arts Young Adult (YA) literature is widely read and published, yet few linguistic studies have researched it. With an increasing push to include YA texts in the classroom, it becomes necessary to thoroughly research the linguistic nature of the register. A 1-million-word corpus of YA fiction and non-fiction texts was created. Children’s and adult fiction corpora were taken from a subset of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) database. The study noted differences in use of modals and pronouns among children’s, YA, and adult registers. Previous research has suggested that children’s literature focus more on spatial relations, while adult literature focuses on temporal relationships. However, the results of this study were unable to verify such relationships. The study also found that YA varied from children’s and adult literature in regards to expletives, body part words, and familial relationships. The findings of this study suggest that YA is linguistically distinct from children’s and adult. This indicates that future studies should focus more on target audience age. These results could also be applied to L1 reading pedagogy. Keywords: young adult literature, corpus, fiction, academic research ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Completion of this project would not have been possible without help. I would like to thank my committee chair, Dr. Egbert, for his support throughout the process. I would also like to thank Dr. Davies and Dr. Gardner for their input and help as well. Dr. Crowe also deserves thanks for introducing me to the academic discussion surrounding YA literature. Finally, I want to thank my family for the incredible support—in academic pursuits and beyond—that they have shown me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS...................................................................................................................... iv LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................................ v LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................................. vi CHAPTER ONE: Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 Definitions................................................................................................................................................. 2 CHAPTER THREE: Literature Review ............................................................................................... 4 Corpus based studies on register variation .............................................................................................. 4 Adult Fiction .............................................................................................................................................. 5 Young Adult Literature ............................................................................................................................. 5 L1 reading Pedagogy ................................................................................................................................. 7 Variation within Juvenile Fiction ............................................................................................................ 10 CHAPTER FOUR: Methods ............................................................................................................. 12 Corpus construction ............................................................................................................................... 12 Comparative corpora .............................................................................................................................. 15 Features examined ................................................................................................................................. 16 CHAPTER FIVE: Results and Discussion ......................................................................................... 17 Modals .................................................................................................................................................... 17 Body Parts ............................................................................................................................................... 19 Pronouns ................................................................................................................................................. 22 Time words ............................................................................................................................................. 23 Expletives ................................................................................................................................................ 25 Animals ................................................................................................................................................... 25 Spatial words .......................................................................................................................................... 27 Parental relationships ............................................................................................................................. 28 Other familial relationships .................................................................................................................... 30 CHAPTER SIX: Conclusions ............................................................................................................ 32 Summary of findings ............................................................................................................................... 32 Limitations .............................................................................................................................................. 33 Future research ...................................................................................................................................... 34 Implications ............................................................................................................................................ 36 APPENDIX A: Books included in the corpus .................................................................................. 38 Fiction books ........................................................................................................................................... 38 Appendix B: Keyword Lists ............................................................................................................ 40 APPENDIX C: Tables....................................................................................................................... 50 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................. 54 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Modals ............................................................................................................................. 50 Table 2: Body part words .............................................................................................................. 50 Table 3: Pronouns ......................................................................................................................... 50 Table 4: Time words ...................................................................................................................... 51 Table 5: Spatial words ................................................................................................................... 51 Table 6: Expletives ........................................................................................................................ 51 Table 7: Animal Words .................................................................................................................. 52 Table 8:
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