Collocations and Narratives

Abstract

The final part of this book is devoted to an exploration of how collocation can be connected with literary themes, topics, contexts, characters and narratives. As a case study for a close examination of collocations in a literary text, I selected Bleak House for two particular reasons. One is Dickens’ use of the unusual strategy of dual narration in the text. The story is narrated by two quite different narrators: a third-person narrator, who seems to be a mature and experienced male adult, and a first-person narrator who is a young woman. The two distinct voices can be easily discerned from the viewpoints of subjectivity, gender, theme, characters and style. However, a collocational approach can bring into relief another distinction between the narrators’ points of view and the tone of language and style that each uses, throwing a new and notable light upon the study of style of Bleak House. The second reason for choosing Bleak House is that in this work, as Miller (1991: 12) points out, ‘each character, scene, or situation stands for innumerable other examples of a given type’. The various characters and scenes deserving to be regarded as ‘an imitation in words of the culture of a city’ and ‘a model of English society’ (ibid.) are represented through collocations appropriate or peculiar to them, in idiosyncratic ways. Thus, a collocational approach can yield rich dividends.