Corpus Stylistics and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: (De-)constructing the Spirit of the Soul

Corpus Stylistics is an emerging field in the discipline of Linguistics which has become increasingly popular during the last decades: applying corpus methods and techniques to the stylistic analysis of literary texts seems to be a successful way of making linguistic evidence, style ornamentations, aesthetic choices, manners of expressions or deviations from language norms, more visible to the eyes of the traditional literary critic or, simply, the reader. Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man by James Joyce becomes challenging again if we find new lexical, grammatical patterns and structural features that serve as evidence for our critical hypotheses. Easily and rapidly processed computerized corpora provide useful tools that allow to identify textual patterns that would not be easily and immediately noticeable by a ‘traditional’ reader. The main aim of the present paper is to examine some of the religious lexis present in the text with the help of a software and come to new, original conclusions about the use of language made by the Irish writer.