A Corpus Stylistic Analysis of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence

Abstract

Corpus stylistics, an approach integrating linguistics and stylistics, provides quantitative support for research into literary style. This study adopts a corpus stylistic methodology to construct an electronic corpus of Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel Admiring Silence, with ten contemporaneous postcolonial and migration novels as a reference corpus. With the aid of Python and AntConc, analyses of keywords and high-frequency three-word clusters are conducted. The findings show that the novel presents a stable stylistic pattern at the linguistic level: the high frequency of first-person pronouns and "I"-centered clusters sustains a narrative focused on the self-perception of the diasporic subject; the character network and cultural spatial contrasts reflected by keywords point to the protagonist's identity dilemma across two social and cultural contexts; meanwhile, the foregrounding of negative structures in clusters repeatedly reinforces the narrator's uncertainty about emotion, identity and belonging. Furthermore, the repeated appearance of politically relevant keywords and clusters embeds personal memory within the postcolonial historical context of Zanzibar, demonstrating that the narrative unfolds through the interaction of personal experience, psychological stance and historical context, thus forming an integrated narrative structure of the diasporic subject. This study deepens the understanding of Gurnah's narrative style, diasporic experience and political expression, and also illustrates the empirical value and potential applications of quantitative methods in postcolonial textual research.