A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF COHESION AND COHERENCE IN MALE AND FEMALE AUTHORED NOVELS JOYCE’S A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN AND WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS

Abstract

This corpus-based study investigates the role of cohesion and coherence in literary texts, focusing on James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion theory, this research aims to encourage new scholars to explore corpus-based methodologies within literature. By applying Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and collocation analysis, the study seeks to identify key linguistic patterns that contribute to the cohesion and coherence of the texts. The thirty most frequently used words from each text were analyzed, focusing on nouns, verbs, and adjectives, to highlight structural similarities and differences and reveal co-occurring linguistic elements. Using AntConc 3.4.4 software, these findings offer a quantitative lens on how language structures support textual coherence and thematic development within literary works. Employing a corpus-based quantitative research design, the study involved digitizing both texts for analysis. POS tagging and collocation analysis facilitated a systematic examination of linguistic patterns. The digital tool AntConc 3.4.4 enabled accurate identification and categorization of words by parts of speech, supporting comparative analysis between the two works. The study reveals significant patterns in noun, verb, and adjective use across the two texts, demonstrating that cohesion and coherence in literature can be effectively examined through corpus-based approaches. The analysis confirms that certain high-frequency words contribute prominently to the texts' thematic and narrative structure, supporting Halliday and Hasan's cohesion model in literary contexts. This research establishes that corpus-based techniques can provide valuable insights into literary texts, highlighting how cohesion and coherence manifest through specific linguistic structures. The study underscores the potential of corpus linguistics in literary analysis, encouraging future research to integrate these methods for a more comprehensive understanding of literary texts.