earticle

영어

This study aims to investigate the stylistic features of maritime fiction written by Louis Becke, one of the best maritime fiction writers in Australia, in terms of keywords extracted from a study corpus compiling his five maritime novels against a reference corpus composed of general literary novels selected from BNC Baby. Additionally, we compare the list of keywords extracted from the study corpus with that of Joseph Conrad’s maritime fiction corpus to ascertain the distinctive stylistic features of Louis Becke’s writings. The results show that Becke’s maritime fiction has comparatively smaller standardized type/token ratio, shorter mean word length, a broader variety of the maritime vocabulary, and more unique function words than that written by Joseph Conrad, a Polish-British author. Interestingly, some function words extracted as keywords represent Becke’s stylistic characteristics: a conjunction coordinator (and), the first person pronouns (I, we, and me), and modal auxiliaries (will and shall). As expected, it was also observed that there are numerous maritime-related content words such as captain, boat(s), mate, ship, brig, crew, deck, board, reef, ashore, etc. in the top 50 keywords.