Michael Toolan is Professor of English Language in the Department of English, University of Birm-
ingham, having previously taught at the National University of Singapore and the University of Washing-
ton, Seattle. His research interests and areas of publication include literary linguistics (e.g. The Stylistics
of Fiction, 1988) narrative analysis (e.g. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 2nd edition, 2001),
integrational linguistics (e.g. Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language, 1996), and
language in the legal process. He has books forthcoming on narrative progression, and on immersion and
emotion in the reading of literary narrative.
NARRATIVE, Vol. 16, No. 2 (May 2008)
Copyright 2008 by The Ohio State University
Narrative Progression in the
Short Story: First Steps in a
Corpus Stylistic Approach
FRAMING ASSUMPTIONS:
PROSPECTION, EXPECTATION, RESPONSE
I am interested in the putative textual signalings of narrative progression, and
thereafter the reader expectations that these foster; I am trying to identify such sig-
nalings (or narrative prospection, as it is also called) with new research methods,
namely those of corpus linguistics. Research of this kind, blending a literary inter-
est with use of corpus tools, is coming to be known as corpus stylistics (or more
narrowly, corpus narratology). For readers of this journal I assume that neither ex-
plaining nor justifying an interest in narrative progression is necessary, so I will
discuss this relatively briefly. I will spend a little more time outlining what corpus
stylistics entails and what its limitations are; and then I will share some ways in
which I have tried to make it useful in the pursuit of my research interest, the tex-
tualization of narrative prospection.
Narrative prospection is itself only a stage in the experiential sequence of in-
terest to me. I assume that the text’s prospections cumulatively and serially guide
the reader to expect the story currently being read to continue and terminate in one
way rather than others (at the least, the prospections will foster probabilistic ex-
pectations). The ways in which the subsequent narrative text confirms or flouts
Michael Toolan