{"title":"‘As the title implies’: How readers talk about titles in Amazon book reviews","authors":"Sara Bartl, E. Lahey","doi":"10.1177/09639470221147788","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Most stylistic analyses of literary texts begin with the text proper, largely ignoring the paratextual elements that precede it. The extent of this lacuna within stylistics is so great that a search through the back catalogue of Language and Literature, stylistics’ flagship journal, returns no results for contributions whose titles contain the terms ‘title’ or ‘paratext’. In what follows we underline the implications of this neglect through findings which point to the import of titles for readers’ interpretive processes. Drawing on our analysis of a 58-million-word corpus of book reviews from the online retailer Amazon.com, the research reported on here provides evidence for what many theorists have claimed but for which they have often provided no empirical support, namely, that titles contribute to the establishment of reader expectations about a text.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"32 1","pages":"209 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language and Literature","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221147788","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Most stylistic analyses of literary texts begin with the text proper, largely ignoring the paratextual elements that precede it. The extent of this lacuna within stylistics is so great that a search through the back catalogue of Language and Literature, stylistics’ flagship journal, returns no results for contributions whose titles contain the terms ‘title’ or ‘paratext’. In what follows we underline the implications of this neglect through findings which point to the import of titles for readers’ interpretive processes. Drawing on our analysis of a 58-million-word corpus of book reviews from the online retailer Amazon.com, the research reported on here provides evidence for what many theorists have claimed but for which they have often provided no empirical support, namely, that titles contribute to the establishment of reader expectations about a text.
期刊介绍：
Language and Literature is an invaluable international peer-reviewed journal that covers the latest research in stylistics, defined as the study of style in literary and non-literary language. We publish theoretical, empirical and experimental research that aims to make a contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on readers. Topics covered by the journal include (but are not limited to) the following: the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, cognitive approaches to text comprehension, corpus and computational stylistics, the stylistic investigation of multimodal texts, pedagogical stylistics, the reading process, software development for stylistics, and real-world applications for stylistic analysis. We welcome articles that investigate the relationship between stylistics and other areas of linguistics, such as text linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation studies. We also encourage interdisciplinary submissions that explore the connections between stylistics and such cognate subjects and disciplines as psychology, literary studies, narratology, computer science and neuroscience. Language and Literature is essential reading for academics, teachers and students working in stylistics and related areas of language and literary studies.
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