Abstract
Drawing on a corpus which separates dialogue and narrative sections in The Lord of the Rings, the present chapter explores the most common syntactic n-grams (i.e. sequences of syntactic tags) in the narrative section. Using the imaginative prose section of the PHRASEOROM corpus (post-war fiction) and the British National Corpus as a reference, we extracted the statistically most significant 3-grams, 4-grams, 5-grams and 6-grams. The chapter pays equal attention to constructions that Tolkien, compared to other authors, tends to avoid, and to those that he prefers. The chapter is rounded off with two sample paragraphs which illustrate how the syntactic patterns identified blend together to produce different kinds of narrative effect.
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Works Cited
Primary Text:
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The Lord of the Rings. 1954–55. London: HarperCollins, 2007.
Critical Works Cited:
Legallois, Dominique, and Stefan Koch. “The Notion of Motif where Disciplines Intersect: Folkloristics, Narrativity, Bioinformatics, Automatic Text Processing and Linguistics.” In Iva Novakova and Dirk Siepmann, eds. Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel: A Synthesis of Corpus and Literary Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 17–46.
Novakova, Iva, and Dirk Siepmann, eds. Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel: A Synthesis of Corpus and Literary Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Turner, Allan. “Prose Style.” In Michael D.C. Drout, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. New York: Routledge, 2007. 545–546.
Vincensini, Jean-Jacques. Motifs et thèmes du récit médiéval. Paris: Nathan, 2000.
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Kullmann, T., Siepmann, D. (2021). The Narrative Syntax of The Lord of the Rings. In: Tolkien as a Literary Artist. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69299-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69299-5_3
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-69299-5
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