A Corpus-based Comparative Analysis of Linguistic Features in Silent Spring and To Kill a Mockingbird

Abstract

Silent Spring and To Kill a Mockingbird are two novels written by two American women - Rachel Carson and Harper Lee, respectively. The study attempts to comparatively uncover the linguistic features in the two novels by means of the corpus tool Multi-dimensional Analysis Tagger and the statistical tool SPSS. It is found that the text of Silent Spring is quite different from the text of To Kill a Mockingbird, among which Silent Spring is classified into the register of “general narrative exposition”, and To Kill a Mockingbird is classified into the register of “Imaginative narrative”. Besides, the text of Silent Spring is characterized by more structures of that relative clauses on subject position, prepositions, attributive adjectives, long words, downtoners, phrasal coordination, agentless passives and conjuncts. However, the text of To Kill a Mockingbird is featured by more structures of past tense, verbs, analytic negation, direct WH-questions, first person pronouns, subordinator that deletion and predictive modals.