Textual building blocks and the shaping of fictional universes in spanish realism: A corpus approach

Abstract

This paper analyses textual building blocks in fictional narratives of Spanish Realism, focusing on their function as a textual device with which authors shape their fictional narratives. The analysis has been carried out in a corpus of one hundred novels by nine canonical authors (c. 8 million words). In order to identify textual building blocks a corpus-stylistic approach has been used, which has made it possible to automatically retrieve the examples and gauge their textual saliency. Textual building blocks have been classified in four main groups: space, time, body language and discourse. The analysis of the examples reveals a series of linguistic habits that may be considered common to Spanish Realism in general, going well beyond the idiosyncratic style of individual authors.